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School Libraries, Public Libraries, and the NAEP Reading Scores
References
School Libraries, Public Libraries, and the NAEP Reading Scores
Stephen D. Krashen
- Stephen Krashen, The Power of Reading (Englewood, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 1993).
- Keith Lance, Lynda Wellborn, and Christine Hamilton--Pennell, The Impact of School Library Media Centers on Academic Achievement (Castle Rock, Colo.: Hi Willow, 1993).
- Warwick Elley, How in the World Do Students Read? (Hamburg, Germany: International Assn. of the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, 1992).
- Marilyn Miller and Marilyn Shontz, "Expenditures for Resources in School Library Media Centers, FY 1991-92," School Library Journal 39 (Oct. 1993): 26-36.
- Ina Mullis, Jay Campbell, and Alan Farstrup, NAEP 1992 Reading Report Card for the Nation and the States. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, 1993.
- Howard D. White, "School Library Collections and Services: Ranking the States," SLMQ 19 (Fall 1990): 13-26.
- Adrienne Chute, Public Libraries in the U.S.: 1990. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement.
- Mullis, Campbell, and Farstrup, NAEP 1992 Reading Report Card.
- Inspection of the scatterplot for the correlation between books per student in school library media centers and reading scores revealed a hyperbolic relationship: high reading scores were possible with few books per student, but many books per student was consistently associated with a high reading score, suggesting that a good library will nearly always help, but that children may get books from other sources. A more linear relationship was found between the two variables by transforming the independent variable. Transforming x (books per student) into -1/x, for example, results in a correlation of .562, a modest improvement over the original .495. The original untransformed value was kept in the regression analysis for ease of interpretation.
- Lance, Wellborn, and Hamilton-Pennell, The Impact of School Library Centers on Academic Achievement.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Because of the correlations among some of the predictors (table 2), a test of multicollinearity was performed; all independent variables were regressed on one another. The results confirmed the presence of some multicollinearity: dep. variable = r2
SL: books = .643
SL: software = .418
SL: service = .052
PL = .261
exp = .043
This modest degree of multicollinearity could be reduced by eliminating some predictors and doing a new analysis. Barry and Feldman (1985) note, however, that the consequences of misspecification are more serious than the consequences of multicollinearity. Thus, a new analysis was not performed. Instead, as Barry and Feldman suggest, we "recognize its presence but live with its consequences" (p. 49). The consequences include the fact that parameter estimates may vary widely among samples. Thus, replication of these results with other samples is called for (William Barry and Stanley Feldman, Multiple Regression in Practice). (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1985).
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