Date Approved

5-1-2001

Embargo Period

6-2-2016

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.A. in School and Public Librarianship

Department

Special Educational Services/Instruction

College

College of Education

Advisor

Shontz, Marilyn

Subject(s)

Instructional materials centers--Book selection

Disciplines

Library and Information Science

Abstract

The concept of teaching to the ability of the child is complex. Each child absorbs, analyzes and processes information differently. Howard Gardner developed a series of eight intelligences describing the variety of ways in which children learn. This study focused on the Naturalist Intelligence, an ability to recognize and discriminate different concepts in nature. A naturalist learner has strong observational skills and is good at sorting and classifying (Checkley, 1997). This evaluation compares randomly selected samples of the collections of two elementary school library media centers in order to determine whether the books in the 500s support Gardner's Theory of Naturalist Intelligence. The results indicated that many of the books, although factual and inviting to the eye, need to use more charts, diagrams, websites, addresses, indexes and bibliographies to expand the knowledge of the naturalist learner.

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