Research in School Library Media for the Next Decade:Polishing the Diamond.

OVER THE NEXT DECADE, research in school library media should locus explicitly on the relationship between library media programs and student learning. Attention to this topic has been a growing theme in the fieldʹs research for decades, and a number of factors argue for making it even more central in the coming years: the increasing emphasis on learning and achievement throughout education; the deepening appreciation for the library media specialistʹs various roles as they relate to this emphasis on learning; the emergence of electronic information resources that highlight the relationship between learning and information use as never before; and the publication of the Information Literacy Skills for Student Learning in Information Power: Building Partnerships for Learning (American Association of School Librarians and Association for Educational Communications and Technology [AASL and AECT], 1998). These statements of learning outcomes related to information use tie the school library media field directly to learning as nothing has done before. They provide both a rationale and a conceptual framework for studying studentsʹ interactions with information as the kind of authentic learning that is the goal of education in the twenty-first century.