Today’s educators maintain a difficult balance covering growing amounts of curriculum content, managing accountability standards, and developing independent, creative learners with 21st Century skills and dispositions. Inquiry pedagogies like Guided Inquiry (GI) offer a framework to support teachers and teacher librarians working together to support these goals. This research uses the American Association of School Librarians’ National School Library Standards for Learners (2018c) to investigate students’ research process in a collaborative GI unit with teachers and teacher librarians. Findings indicate students want more teacher guidance, but also recognize the importance of developing their own information literacy and research skills independently.
The 2017 Standards Framework for Learners designed by the American Association of School Librarians offers educators a support guide for creating, implementing and assessing meaningful, structured learning tasks focused on important information literacy skills for students. In this study, we use the Curate element of the AASL Standards Framework for Learners as a lens to analyse students’ voices and experiences while engaged in a Guided Inquiry unit, focusing particularly on their information seeking and use. Findings indicate students have sophisticated understandings of their own information literacy skills, how they engage with information, and the skills needed to be efficient curators of information, but they feel challenged and unconfident about their own skills in completing research tasks. These findings support the role of the school librarian in scaffolding young researchers through this process.
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