Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Middle School Information and Digital Literacy Project

Thanks to Chris Armstrong for alerting me to the following. "The Center for Digital Literacy at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies is conducting a national online survey of US 8th graders and the library media specialist / teacher librarians at their schools. The study measures students' perceived and actual competence in information and digital literacy, and some other motivational variables that may impact students' information seeking." They are going to recruit teacher librarians from schools in the USA and are asking interested parties to fill in a questionnaire (the first stage of the selection process). I don't know how old 8th graders would be, so if anyone from the USA can add a comment telling us, that would be useful.
The questionnaire is at http://imls8.syr.edu/survey/index.php?sid=3D5 and the home page for the Middle School Information and Digital Literacy Project is at http://imls8.syr.edu/

2 comments:

Jacqui Weetman DaCosta said...

Hi Sheila,

In response to your question about 8th graders, they would be around 13. To help me out with US schooling, I always add 5 to the grade, on the assumption that the children would be 5 when they started school. I actually taught some 7th graders yesterday who are here on a summer camp. Out of 24, around 8 put their hands up to say that they had already used databases in their school, which I thought was great.

Jacqui Weetman DaCosta
The College of New Jersey

Sheila Webber said...

Thanks, Jacqui!