Empowering Sixth-Grade Students’ Digital Literacy Through Teacher-Librarian Collaborative Teaching: A Mixed Methods Study

Abstract Despite an increasing emphasis on digital literacy by state and national standards, many students still fail to develop essential digital literacy skills, in part because core content teachers are unprepared or lack the time to integrate these skills into their instruction. This convergent mixed methods study examined the impact of a collaborative teaching model between a social studies teacher and a librarian on sixth-grade students’ ability to apply digital literacy within a content-rich learning environment. Quantitative data were drawn from students’ summative project scores in two social studies units graded by the teacher and the librarian. Qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews with purposively selected students with a focus on their experience with the integrated lessons co-taught by the teacher and the librarian. Quantitative findings revealed that students’ performance on social studies projects, including disciplinary knowledge and digital literacy competencies, improved following the integrated, co-teaching unit. Qualitative data provided insight into these gains, highlighting that students developed a stronger awareness of the value of digital literacy and improved their interests in integrated lessons that combined social studies and digital literacy instruction. The convergence of the findings from the two sources provided a comprehensive understanding of teacher-librarian collaborative teaching in integrated lessons and its potential for fostering students’ digital literacy.