Building Scientific Thinking through Inquiry-Designed Research and Practice in School Libraries

The AASL National Standards for Learners, School Librarians, and School Libraries (2018) strongly emphasizes inquiry and the inquiry process. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) (National Research Council, 2013) describes scientific thought as four-fold: wondering, investigating, questioning, data collecting and analyzing. School librarians use multimedia methods to directly teach students to use the inquiry process to think scientifically. Students learn to initiate scientific research by formulating questions based on prior knowledge and curiosity. Students engage in the inquiry process by first developing questions then searching for and using evidence to investigate their questions. They learn to interact with the content they and others find to further their own and each other’s knowledge, and they learn to continue questioning and building on the new knowledge they attain. When students fail to find the answers to their questions in the first place they look, they learn resilience. School librarians promote the use of trusted subscription databases and teach how to effectively search using Google Scholar. And in school library instruction, students learn to use information resources from governments, historical societies, and museums. Student-conducted scientific research is benefited by using multimedia resources such as videos, podcasts, device apps, websites, and maker activities as well as school librarian created digital curations of scientific resources. In using multimedia resources, makerspaces, and advanced levels of curation techniques, school libraries are leading the charge in scientific inquiry and investigation.