Perceived value to teachers and students of school visit programmes in New Zealand

Abstract

Public libraries in New Zealand and around the world run outreach programmes for primary school children. There is support from a variety of professional organisations to offer these programmes, LIANZA and the Library Association in Britain to name two. The reason for such programmes is to support literacy development because it is thought that public libraries can provide resources and an environment that will do this (Celano and Neuman 2001). A common form of these programmes is the class visit where a teacher brings the children from her class to attend a session at the library. There has been very little research into the class visit programme to verify its value, and yet, across New Zealand and throughout the world many such programmes being run. The current study sought to look, in a preliminary way, at the value perceived by the teachers and students of the class visit programme. The study was based on a simple survey designed for the teachers and students involved. The students were aged between seven and ten years of age. Four schools participated across the Wellington City area, providing 118 completed questionnaires from the children. Only eight teachers completed the teacher's questionnaire. The children were asked questions about what they liked, or liked least, about the elements that made up class visits; how they liked class visits generally; if their opinion of libraries had varied since attending class visits, and finally, what elements of their visits to the libraries generally they liked or disliked. The teachers were asked how they perceived the children felt about these things and if they thought class visits encouraged the children to visit the libraries out of school hours.There were some problems with the survey in that the children's responses had shown up some ambiguities in the style of questioning. Also the number of results from the teachers was disappointing, as was the fact that the majority of the teachers had done a little survey of the class to answer the questions and not provided their own opinions. The preliminary nature of the survey also pointed out the need for more specific questioning in relation to whether the children had in fact increased their visits to the library since attending school visits.However, regardless of these problems, the results were overwhelmingly positive with the children liking most elements of class visits and the library. Both sexes felt similarly about the questions and responded accordingly. The element of the class visits liked least by the children was the librarian's talk and the element liked least about libraries generally was the library environment. Both of these issues require further study to work out how best to resolve them, though some possible solutions are available immediately. The responses when looked at in relation to SCORE (Strong, Harvey & Robinson 1995), a tool for measuring motivation to learn, were mostly favourable, indicating that largely the libraries provided a positive learning environment, though both the unpopularity of the library environment and the fact the children did not particularly like the librarians talk had an effect. To a greater extent though the elements for literacy development were present, and this provides confidence for further investigation of class visit programmes to show how public libraries are of value to school aged children.