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National emphases on STEM learning and digital textbooks have highlighted the importance of high quality digital instructional materials. Because teachers often lack the time and expertise to find, assess, and organize multimedia, school librarians can support STEM learning by providing media-rich, current, curriculum-linked library collections. To determine whether Discovery Education Streaming, a leading commercial database is a viable source of school library STEM resources, the researcher analyzed its multimedia assets by media, grade, category, and copyright. Results suggested that the database's extensive content was comprised mainly of video segments, complete videos, and images but that this content was outdated, had uneven grade coverage, and addressed limited topics. While the results raise concerns about Discovery Education Streaming as an enhancement to library collections, careful use of these sources may allow school librarians opportunities to integrate high quality digital assets into their collections through specific strategies for policy, research, and practice.
Effective science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning experiences center on two variables: high quality learning resources and high quality pedagogy; deeply intertwined, neither variable alone is sufficient to improve student achievement.1 The role of resources in K-12 education is so crucial that the ability to locate instructional information is a significant driver of teacher quality, and confidence in the ability to integrate available resources can be used as a proxy measure of educator effectiveness.2 For these reasons, the school library collection matters. The school librarian is the sole educator tasked with building and maintaining a collection of diverse, high quality, current resources that support curriculum, complement adopted texts, enable professional learning, and pique student interest. Despite the pleas of school library researchers, policymakers, and educators for making instructional collaboration and leadership the defining elements of the school librarian's role, three decades of scholarly researchers have consistently concluded that a well-curated collection of learning resources assembled and maintained by a qualified school library professional has a measurable relationship with student achievement.3
Current educational initiatives may give the school library collection an even greater role in student learning. The US Department of Education is urging school administrators to focus on two main reform issues: STEM education and digital textbooks.4 Policymakers have noted that "the world todays students will inherit will be one defined to an even...