A measure of what we hold dear!

I’ve never worried about my students’ abilities to game, IM each other after school, download music, or buy cool stuff online.  But there are more critical competencies I want to ensure my students master before they graduate.  Among many other things, I want them to be able to identify their information needs, search a database strategically, evaluate information sources, analyze the data they collect, synthesize information from a variety of sources, and create and communicate information in effective and meaningful ways. 

I am not alone.  

Colleges and universities are increasingly concerned about the information, communication, and thinking skills of those entering their doors and leaving them as a 21^st century workforce.  

And so the Educational Testing Service (ETS) in partnership with group of major universities designed and rolled out an assessment to measure the extent to which young people can demonstrate their abilities to solve information problems—to access, manage, integrate, evaluate, and create–using digital technology and communication tools. Their work was guided by was guided by the work of the International Information and Communication Technology Literacy Panel, a multinational group of experts from education, government, nongovernmental organizations, labor and the private sector. In its report, the panel redefines the standard notion of the “digital divide” and advises that it no longer be defined in terms of limited physical access to hardware software and networks. Rather, it is “driven by limited literacy levels and a lack of the cognitive skills needed to make effective use of these technologies.”

”It’s shocking how many students come to college without these skills,” said Terry Egan, ETS project manager, who explained that the test was not a measure of technology use.  “It is a measure of the use cognitive skills in technology rich environments, skills we had no way of measuring before.”

Egan describes the concerns coming from higher education as two-fold.  “We’ve made an extraordinary investment in technology, but we had no way to measure whether our investment was worth it, whether our curriculum was effective, and how we could better prepare our students.  We also had no way to identify students who needed help and separate those who already had the skills.”

This is a new type of standardized exam, designed not for college admissions but for placement and for evaluation of student competencies to help universities evaluate their existing approaches to ICT education.

It’s the kind of test I’d actually like to take. Unlike traditional standardized tests, which use discrete, often artificial tasks to evaluate performance, this highly interactive assessment simulates situations students, workers, and citizens are likely to encounter in real-life digital environments.  Test takers use a PC, paper and pencil for notes, and simulated software applications–spreadsheets, databases, e-mails–to complete the test’s tasks. Unlike standard multiple choice assessments, this test measures a process and accordingly accepts a range of levels of response, and in most cases is not reliant on an absolutely correct answer.

Among a wide variety of tasks, students are asked to: evaluate and distinguish reliable Web sources, construct an advanced search in a database, visually represent and analyze data to answer research questions, synthesize and compare data from a variety of sources to make effective decisions.

“Information and communication technology literacies are foundational skills, on par with math and English,” notes Gordon W. Smith, professor at California State University, one of the seven university systems that worked with ETS to develop the test’s format and questions. “The assessment will tell us where our students are and how we can work to better prepare them for the demands of the 21^st century.” As for Cal State’s recent test of the test with 3300 of its 400,000 students, Smith reports, “We were disappointed but not surprised by performance of the freshmen who took the assessment. These preliminary results confirmed that students’ casual computer skills do not translate to the critical literacies they will need in the workplace. There is clearly work to be done.”
ETS plans to launch a shorter Advanced level version of the ICT Literacy Assessment for rising college juniors in January 2006. It will provide students with scores that will allow them to compare their individual performance with those of other test takers.  ETS also plans to launch a Core version of the test for students transitioning from high school to two-year or four-year institutions early next year.

A flash demo of the ICT Literary Assessment is available on the site http://www.ets.org/ictliteracy/demo.html

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