TEACHER LIBRARIANS’ ROLES IN INFORMATION LITERACY INSTRUCTION IN BANGKOK SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Abstract

The purposes of this study are to: investigate the situation of library instruction in secondary schools in Bangkok; study the roles of teacher librarians in these schools regarding information literacy instruction; and compare these teacher librarians’ roles by classifying them according to their Library and Information Science(LIS) educational background, length of working experience and library instruction experiences. The samples are 102 teacher librarians. The first research tool is AASL and AECT standardized questionnaires covering three standards: information literacy, independent learning and social responsibility. The second tool is an interview with eleven teacher librarians. SPSS for Windows is used to analyze the data and F-test and t-test are used to assess the hypotheses. The results are as follows: (a) The status of library instruction comprises both formal and informal instructions. As for formal instruction, a customized library class is included in the lower secondary education curriculum, while most organized activities for informal instruction includes advice on learning resources and information retrieval; (b) Considering teacher librarians' roles in information literacy instruction, both overall and specific results are high. However, the results from the interview reveal that most teacher librarians do not have true understanding of what they are teaching; (c) The comparison results of teacher librarians’ roles in information literacy instruction are first, on the LIS educational background item, the overall differentiation of statistical significance is 0.5. Teacher librarians with LIS degree have more important roles than those who do not. The specific results also show some differences in terms of information literacy and independent learning. Second, on the item of the length of working experience, no difference is found from both overall and specific results. Third, the overall results on library instruction experience item show no difference. However, the specific results show some difference on the social responsibility item. Teacher librarians with high level of teaching experience have more important roles than those with moderate level of experience.