Exploring Secondary School Student Factors and Academic Outcomes at the Kitengesa Community Library

This chapter provides an overview of research exploring the impact of the rural village library and other factors on secondary school students, a group of users that have been identified as a critical user group with a particular set of needs. Students in general are typically heavy users of these rural libraries, and use of the libraries by students take place within the context of complicated social, cultural, and environmental constructs, such as gender, socioeconomic status, reading habits, chronic poverty, and low literacy rates. These and other demographic factors are presented in chapter 1. Understanding the importance of these libraries to students is critical in light of the fact that schools in rural areas in Africa have little if any access to library or other reading materials and suffer from profound textbook shortages. Two groups of students—one with access to a rural village library and one without—served as the target population in a study of five factors related to students’ academic achievement (as measured by Overall Grade Average or OGA). The factors that were examined included library access, reading frequency, the presence of printed materials in the home, and the recreational reading of specific printed materials in the home. Taken together, the results provide some sense of the complexities involved in enhancing student outcomes in rural areas. The findings of this study may serve to highlight challenges associated with learning in rural environments as well as services that may help such as the rural village library.