Storytime Librarians Are Striving to Deliver Effective Storytime Programming to Children with Disabilities and Developmental Delays
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A Review of: Daskalakes, D. T. M., & Cahill, M. (2023). “We’re all pretty welcoming”: Inclusion of children with disabilities in library storytime programs. Journal of Early Intervention. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/10538151231176193 Objective – To identify and characterize public librarians’ inclusion of children with disabilities and developmental delays (and their caregivers) in storytime programming, and to characterize how librarians determine if inclusion was successful. Design – Qualitative study using semi-structured interviews. Setting – Public library settings across Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana (United States). Subjects – 34 public librarians offering storytime programming. Methods – The researchers invited all public libraries in the geographic area of interest to complete an internet survey expressing their interest in participating, and from the responses a stratified random sample of libraries was chosen. From each of these libraries, researchers randomly selected one storytime librarian to participate in the study. An experienced research team member conducted interviews using video conferencing software, and the other team member reviewed all transcripts to ensure accuracy. The researchers first analyzed the data using an inductive approach to generate descriptive codes. They then assigned these codes to the data that matched the study’s research questions. Finally, they conducted a third round of coding to describe some topics in greater detail. Main Results – Librarians are making attempts to be inclusive, and their attitudes toward children with disabilities and developmental delays (and their caregivers) are welcoming and flexible. However, they expressed limited experience in offering accommodations, and they perceived their positive attitude as being an accommodation in and of itself. Librarians are largely relying on the child’s experience to gauge how successful they are at being inclusive, and engaging in collaborative conversations with caregivers is also common. Conclusion – Overall, librarians are interested in offering programs that are accessible to children with disabilities and developmental delays but struggle to engage with meaningful accommodations that promote better educational outcomes. The authors emphasize that it is important for libraries to be welcoming of everyone, but more should be done to actually meet the needs of these patrons. This study has implications for public libraries and librarians, who should review their practices to ensure they are addressing the needs of children with disabilities and developmental delays and their caregivers. It also has implications for the profession, as it supports the idea that librarians should be better prepared to support these patrons in storytime programming and that institutions should facilitate librarian efforts through information exchanges. Finally, this study establishes that there is a need for further exploration of inclusivity for children with disabilities and developmental delays in storytime programming.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".