Recently in Academic Study Reading Category

I did not know this... from the Atlanta-Fulton public libraries website...

 At the time that the [Atlanta] Carnegie Library opened[in 1902], African-American scholar and activist W.E.B. DuBois led a group of African-Americans in an unsuccessful effort to receive representation on the Library Board, full use of the new library, or at least some branches to provide for their needs. Andrew Carnegie had offered funds for a branch library for black citizens, but the money was not used for years. Finally, in 1921, the Auburn Avenue Branch Library (1921-1949) began operating as the first of three branches eventually established to serve African-American patrons in the years before integration.

I am reading Reading Places: Literacy, Democracy, and the Public Library in Cold War America, Univ of Massachusetts Press, 2010 by Christine Pawley.

It is a study of a short-lived bookmobile project in upper Wisconsin in Door and Kewaunee counties in the early 1950s.  Pawley cobbles together the extant records of the project and interviewed many of those involved, including the rural librarians and especially the readers.  In many ways it reminds me so much of our library promotion efforts in Burkina Faso and Ghana, except I keep sighing as I realize that her occasional statistics (like 30% of adult women having attended high school) are almost wildly huge compared with Burkina Faso where maybe 1% of adult women attend high school!  But the most important issues: who are the library services for (it always ends up being for children) and how to get more adults reading (very hard) are issues in Africa.  There are nice descriptions of the tradeoffs faced in extending library services, and the political minefields that affect funding.

The book offers a number of suggestions for quantitative research that I am interested in with some colleagues, namely how to estimate the magnitude of the impacts of library services.  In estimating these magnitudes we are always looking for reasons why library services varied somewhat randomly... then if we can find measures of outcomes that happened years down the road, we have some good methods for estimating the magnitudes of the effects.  Pawley's book reminded me that the WPA built out a lot of rural libraries during the Depression, perhaps comparable in scale to Carnegie's build out earlier....  And of course the Door-Kewaunee experiment would have been like a controlled experiment, except that the two counties are on a peninsula extending into Lake Michigan!  So no "control" counties neighboring them.

An excellent short review of the book by "Marvin" is here and I'm grateful because he reminded me of the series of Landmark biographies that Iread also as a child... doezens of them

That is a quote from "What people want to read about: a study of group interests and a survey of problems in adult reading" by Douglas Waples, Ralph Winfred Tyler, 1931, Joint Committee on a Study of Reading Habits, American Library Association, Carnegie Corporation of New York. 

It is a truism that always bears repeating and always has to be qualified.

The article cites no research or evidence on the impact of school libraries compared with "full-day" teachers.  Remarkable actually that a large-scale randomized experiment has not been run where one period a day students spend in quiet free reading time in the library, with helpful guidance about reading choices from a librarian.  My prior is that 2-3 years of that "treatment" would show that library reading time generates better reading scores and more "knowledge" than in-class time, which has to be marginally effective in its 7th hour, and that the variable costs are probably similar if not lower (libraries do have significant fixed costs, but the irony of the article - validated by our local experience here in San Jose- is that the public loves spending money on library infrastructure, while school officials love cutting library variable costs).

The schools superintendent in Lancaster, Pa., said he had to eliminate 15 of the district's 20 librarians to save full-day kindergarten classes. In the Salem-Keizer school district in Oregon, all 48 elementary and middle school librarians would lose their jobs under a budget proposal that faces a vote next week. In Illinois's School District 90, which spans several rural and suburban communities in the southern part of the state, parent volunteers have been running the libraries in the district's seven schools since September, in what the schools superintendent, Todd Koehl, described as "a last-ditch effort" to avoid closing their doors. And in New York City, half of the secondary schools appear to be in violation of a state regulation requiring them to have a librarian on staff, with the city currently employing 365 licensed librarians. "The dilemma that schools will face is whether to cut a teacher who has been working with kids all day long in a classroom or cut teachers who are working in a support capacity, like librarians," the city's chief academic officer, Shael Polakow-Suransky, said in an interview. In New York, as in districts across the country, many school officials said they had little choice but to eliminate librarians, having already reduced administrative staff, frozen wages, shed extracurricular activities and trimmed spending on supplies. Technological advances are also changing some officials' view of librarians: as more classrooms are equipped with laptops, tablets or e-readers, Mr. Polakow-Suransky noted, students can often do research from their desks that previously might have required a library visit. "It's the way of the future," he said.

"The way of the future"?  He needs to visit Martin Luther King, Jr. library in San Jose, or Joyce Ellington Branch library to see how nicely libraries fit into the future.

I'll read the paper, but I am wary of abstracts that don't actually say what they found... other than "insights"... apparently they didn't find any way to improve themselves as effective communicators.  (Hey, it's a blog!  Remember "being snarky"?)

We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of 'culturomics,' focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. Culturomics extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.

From this morning's New York Times: African Huts Off the Grid Glow With Renewable Power

"With the advent of cheap solar panels and high-efficiency LED lights, which can light a room with just 4 watts of power instead of 60, these small solar systems now deliver useful electricity at a price that even the poor can afford, he noted. "You're seeing herders in Inner Mongolia with solar cells on top of their yurts," Mr. Younger said."

With our iPod trumpeting Christmas music, the lights on our mini synthetic tree glowing brightly, and a couple of laptops charging to watch Love Actually later this morning, it's easy to forget that just a few months ago I had to bike into the local market to charge my cellphone at a solar shack once a week or bike 40km into Djibo to charge my laptop once a month in order to use it for a couple of hours to catch up on 30 Rock and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  But last night as I travelled by bus down to Bobo-Dioulasso to celebrate with other Peace Corps Volunteers, I watched countless bonfires dance along the horizon, defining the distance between those who are on-the-grid here in Burkina and those whose villages have yet to be plugged in.

But big city or little village, solar panels are prevalent in Burkina Faso.  Even on the streets of Ouagadougou one sees them stacked for sale outside boutiques and in the Grand Marché.  And the Volunteer who worked in Belehede before me started a fundraising campaign to finance the purchase of solar panels for the local elementary school and a computer to keep better records of students' performance.  While I have not been back to visit due to lingering security issues in the Sahel, I've been told that the panels are in place and functioning well, even if the computer is unfortunately just gathering dust at the moment.

Here at FAVL, we're excited to see how we can incorporate solar technology into our libraries and programs in Burkina Faso.  We recently received a $5,000 grant to purchase LED lights and run a study evaluating the effects they induce in several communities.  Emilie and I will be designing and implementing a study early in the new year in an effort to gauge the utility of the lights at the village level.  We're hoping to observe results such as those that the Times reports taking place in Kenya:

"Since Ms. Ruto hooked up the system, her teenagers' grades have improved because they have light for studying. The toddlers no longer risk burns from the smoky kerosene lamp. And each month, she saves $15 in kerosene and battery costs -- and the $20 she used to spend on travel."

While it's hard to imagine the lights not making a positive impact on the communities, there is the slight fear that they await the same fate as the new computer in Belehede: relegation to a dusty corner, box unopened.  Or, that the children who are the intended beneficiaries of our project will have their lights appropriated by older family members or members of the community.  We'll be doing our best to make sure that the lights remain in the kids' hands and that they will be used to help bring about the forthcoming reading revolution that Michael blogged about a few days ago.

However, while we hope that everyone here in Burkina will eventually have access to affordable, renewable sources of light, there will always be those moments when it's still better to hit the switch.

Did I already make reference to this interesting paper?
Williams, E., Extensive reading in Malawi: inadequate implementation or inappropriate innovation? Journal of Research in Reading, 2007

This article reports on the evaluation of an extensive reading programme in primary schools in Malawi, one of the poorest countries in Africa. The programme involved the delivery of book boxes at Years 4 and 5 to every Malawian primary school. Summative evaluation was achieved through baseline and project-end testing, with observations and interviews employed for illuminative purposes. A time-lapse design was employed, with testing in 1995 of Year 6 students (who had not had the programme in Years 4 and 5), and retesting in 1999 of Year 6 students in the same schools (who had had the programme in Years 4 and 5). Results unexpectedly showed a statistically significant decrease in mean score. The article explores deficiencies in programme implementation, but concludes that implementing educational innovations in Malawi requires sensitivity to the cultural-educational context. Furthermore, there is merit in Malawians radically questioning the appropriacy of innovations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

Emilie and I (Charley, who needs to set up his own account so his posts don't keep coming up as Emilie's) just got back from Ghana last night, where we were helping Nico and Francesca with their research from the Summer Reading Camps.  We spent the week helping them administer oral reading tests to primary school students from several different schools, some of whom participated in the summer reading camps a couple of months ago.  It was great to see a couple of the libraries there, as we both are familiar only with the FAVL libraries here in Burkina.  Beyond interacting with kids in village, which is always (usually?) a blast, we also enjoyed practicing our English after being in a Francophone country for so long and being referred to as "white man" instead of "les blancs" or "nasara" for a few days.  My camera unfortunately ran out of battery power before I could snap a photo of "King Jesus Chemicals" or "God's Will Beauty Salon," but I managed to get a few shots out at the schools. 

 

Actually, I never had any problem learning how to read in Arabic... but very interesting study...

ScienceDaily (Aug. 31, 2010) -- The brain's right hemisphere is not involved in the initial processes of reading in Arabic, due to the graphic complexity of Arabic script. Therefore, reading acquisition in Arabic is much harder in comparison to English, new research suggests.

The results have revealed that the right brain is involved in the reading process for English and Hebrew, but not for Arabic. The authors explained that in Arabic, identifying the number and location of dots that is critical in order to differentiate between letters is a hard task for the right brain since that hemisphere primarily utilizes global information in order to identify letters. The overall findings support the hypothesis that the complexity results in high perceptual load, contributing to the difficulty and slowness of processing in reading Arabic.

"This means that children acquiring languages other than Arabic draw on the use of both hemispheres in the first stages of learning to read, while children learning to read Arabic do not have the participation of the right brain. Hence, it may be the case that reading processes take longer to be automatized in Arabic. The native Arabic-speaking child is faced with more of a challenge, requiring more practice and particular pedagogic effort -- which demonstrates the need for systematic professional involvement in the teaching of Arabic reading, especially for those who have learning difficulties," the researchers concluded.