MCHENRY, IL – February 20, 2008 – What impact does Florida’s investment in school libraries have on student reading achievement? The answer will come from a statewide data collection effort currently underway by SUNLINK, a project of the College of Education at the University of Central Florida (UCF) and funded by the Florida Department of Education. SUNLINK is gathering data from web-based district library management systems into a centralized data warehouse to compare the relationship between collections, circulation and FCAT reading scores.
The SUNLINK project began collecting data from Miami-Dade, Pinellas, Polk, Leon and St. Lucie school districts in fall of 2007. The goal is to compare library media circulation data to reading achievement, to better integrate library media into instruction, and enhance state library media policies, according to Dr. Tom Atkinson, a UCF professor and director of SUNLINK.
"One of the underlying goals is to help school districts show that libraries are a very important resource in preparing students for high-stakes tests and promoting lifelong reading. We suspect higher circulation may relate to higher FCAT scores. If so, we could further increase scores by improving the collections and focusing more attention on circulation," Atkinson said.
According to Atkinson, the project will provide important benefits for teachers and administrators in the districts. "This project gives schools the ability to analyze how circulation relates to FCAT scores. It encourages school media specialists and administrators to examine ways for improving student achievement," he said. "This data may help identify students at risk and provide individualized reading guidance for selecting materials that prepare students for testing."
The districts included in the study all use Destiny Library Manager, a centralized web-based library management program from Follett Software Company. The program allows each district to easily collect library circulation and collection data. Information from each district is transferred to a data warehouse, also provided by Follett, which then compares the data to FCAT reading scores and other state data.
Atkinson said the use of the TetraData warehouse equipped with TetraData Analysis Suite’s automated analytics tools saved time in implementing the SUNLINK data collection project. "It saved us a lot of time and effort, because the data was already at our fingertips. It was very easy to capture data and immediately begin analyzing it. With limited resources, we needed a solution that avoided a lot of external programming for the district MIS systems and protected the identity of the students," he said.
"Because the data analyzer automates our views of the data, it’s much faster to interpret meaningful results. It really brings the data to life," Atkinson said. Although the project has yet to publish results, it’s already having a significant impact on other Florida school districts, Atkinson said. "This is starting a wildfire across the state. Many schools that were not part of the initial project have begun comparing their circulation data to FCAT scores. A task force of media specialists from several districts will guide the analyses and are anxious to collect and review their own data. We’ve started something that’s quickly moving beyond our immediate expectations," he said.
About SUNLINK
Under the direction of the College of Education at the University of Central Florida, the SUNLINK Project provides an online database of records for materials in Florida’s public school library media centers. It enables students, teachers, parents and school administrators to locate and share reading and instructional materials through an interlibrary loan. Funded by grants from the Florida Department of Education for 20 consecutive years, the database contains more than 1.7 million titles and more than 26.5 million holdings from 2,757 schools in all 67 Florida school districts. The database also includes more than 25,000 reviewed websites, more than 396,000 book jacket cover images and nearly 2,000 streaming video segments.
About Destiny Library Manager Solution
Destiny Library Manager is Follett Software Company’s easy-to-use, web-based library management solution. The solution offers integrated circulation, cataloging, searching, reporting and library management to help each library in a district work more efficiently. Destiny Library Manager provides the right information and resources at the right time, maximizing each school library’s power to support students and teachers, curriculum and instruction.
About TetraData Solution
Follett Software’s TetraData warehousing and analytics solutions capture, integrate and store data from administrative and educational systems and deliver comprehensive and customized data analysis and reporting. With TetraData solutions, educators can easily and accurately assess the factors that drive performance on a district level as well as on an individual student level. With TetraData solutions, educators and administrators from the statehouse to the schoolhouse find it easier to make decisions that can improve instruction and student outcomes.
About Follett Software Company
Follett Software Company is the partner that over half of America's school districts trust to help them manage everything from library resources and school assets to information for data-driven SUNLINK Uses Destiny, TetraData to Measure Library decision-making. Follett Software Company helps districts of all sizes track and use information and resources more efficiently so their dollars are best leveraged to help each and every student.
Follett Software is a subsidiary of Follett Corporation – a $2.37 billion, privately-held company that provides products, services and solutions to the educational marketplace. Follett Corporation was founded in 1873 and has its headquarters in River Grove, Illinois.