Standardized Testing for Technology Literacy On Its Way!

Cal State and ETS (testing company) have joined forces to create a standardized assessment for technology literacy. It is an ICT assessment covering these areas:

Define: The ability to use ICT tools to identify and appropriately represent an information need.
Access: The ability to collect and retrieve information in digital environments. This includes the ability to identify likely digital information sources and to get the information from those sources.
Manage: The ability to apply an existing organizational or classification scheme for digital information. This ability focuses on reorganizing existing digital information from a single source using existing organizational formats. It includes the ability to identify existing organization schemes, select appropriate schemes for the current usage, and apply the schemes.
Integrate: The ability to interpret and represent digital information. This includes the ability to use ICT tools to synthesize, summarize, compare and contrast information from multiple digital sources.
Evaluate: The ability to determine the degree to which digital information satisfies the needs of the task in ICT environments. This includes the ability to judge the quality, relevance, authority, point of view/bias, currency, coverage or accuracy of digital information.
Create: The ability to generate information by adapting, applying, designing or inventing information in ICT environments.
Communicate: The ability to communicate information properly in its context of use for ICT environments. This includes the ability to gear electronic information for a particular audience and to communicate knowledge in the appropriate venue.

Looking through the assessment provides some insight into the types of "questions" the students must solve. They are tasks such as emptying email inboxes of impertinent material or doing searches using Boolean terms to help narrow the results. Database and spreadsheet situations appear as does one requiring the test taker to read an email and create a slide for persuasive presentation of the key facts. Sound a lot like the requirements for our students?

While you can learn more about each of these tasks here, it doesn’t take one long to see that this is just on the horizon for Texas 8th graders. With the technology proficiencies set for these students in NCLB and the Texas Long Range Plan for Technology, school systems will be looking for ways to prove student mastery. While a portfolio is the best measure of this, I am sure it will be too expensive and time consuming for the state. Add to that the subjective nature of assessing one’s work, it would not be easy for the educrats to compare one thing (student, campus, district TEACHER) to another, so they would much prefer the standardized nature of this type of assessment.

So why would you care about this until it happens? Well, in an article titled "Testing for Technology Literacy" (Inside Higher Ed) Cal State is “contemplating making the test a requirement that students would have to pass to move on to higher level courses, much like they do now for writing proficiency.” It won’t be long before other higher ed schools feel the mounting pressure to graduate tech savvy students and start along the same path. We are handicapping our students by not preparing them for this literacy ahead of time.

This article is on the heels of another recent post by Inside Higher Ed titled "Are College Students Techno Idiots?" that discusses student readiness (or lack thereof) in information literacy.

Susan Metros, a professor of design technology at Ohio State University, says that reading, writing and arithmetic are simply not enough for today’s students. What is important for learners is information: how to find it, how to focus it, and how to filter out nonsense. But for many students, their main source for information is Google, which Metros finds troubling.

It doesn't take one too long to see the writing on the wall. Colleges are beginning to take information literacy seriously, and they are going to start demanding that public schools do as well. While ETS's assessment is geared toward high school seniors and college aged students, it is a great window into what the testing companies will be designing for our students and what the colleges are looking for in technology information literacy.

Interested in seeing what another Texas school district is doing to prepare for the changes required by the Long Range Plan for Technology? Check out Miguel Guhlin's blog as well as his district's blog to see how they are thinking their way through the process in San Antonio. Miguel has been posting examples of processes his district has gone through in the past that just might spark some ideas for you such as Big 6, Levels of Engagement, Learning Management Systems, LOTI Questions by Level, Revising Scope and Sequence K-8, and more.