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AASL Information Power Action Research Project
Guidelines for New Schools

Stop! Before you can participate, you must email the AASL Office at aasl@ala.org and you will receive a state and school number. In the meantime, you can test out the surveys. Click here and use the state of Alaska (AK) and school number 125. We will use this as a catch-all for anyone to test and the data and the results will be meaningless.

1. Read the Background and Timetable for an overview of the project.

2. Email the AASL Office at aasl@ala.org and you will receive a state and school number. Before you do this, read item number 5.

3. Once you have your number, you can enter the survey area where the Power Reader and Power Learner surveys are and begin using the surveys. Adults can enter the data or with some assistance, students can enter the data themselves over the Internet. (Each student would have to enter the state and find the school number before answering the questions.)

4. After the data has been entered, you can get the tallies of the results immediately by entering the results area.

5. Depending on what you would like to do in your school, you may want to get two or more codes. For example, if you want to do a before and after study, you should get a code for the "before" data. After entering your "before data" you would promote your reading program or information literacy instruction, and after a space of time (at least a semester), you would have students take the survey again for the "after" study. Then you could compare the results to see if there had been any changes - let's hope in the positive direction.

   There are other ways to use the surveys. Let us say that 10 teachers are participating by promoting reading and/or information literacy heavily and 10 teachers are not participaing in your program. You could have an "experimental" group and a "control" group. Students from the "reading/info lit teacher group" could enter their "before" data in a survey and then after a period of time, take the survey again. Likewise, the students in the "non-participating teacher classes" could take a different "before" data survey and an "after" survey. You could then compare those students whose teachers are pushing reading/info lit with students whose teachers are not. To do this, you would need four codes for four different surveys: Participating Before, Participating After, Non-Participating Before, and Non-Participating After.

   In addition, you can have up to 10 projects per single code in the Power Learner survey. Thus a single teacher can get one code and still compare classes, grades, projects within a class, etc.

6. Because the data is not password protected, we suggest that as soon as you take the surveys, you print out the results and store them just in case someone else might come into your research space and add unwanted data.