Viewpoint: Why ICT Literacy Assessment Is Needed Now

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Viewpoint: Why ICT Literacy Assessment Is Needed Now

1/2/2006

By Dr. Ilene F. Rockman
The California State University, Office of the Chancellor

Today's college students are adept at downloading music, using instant messaging to chat with friends, sending e-mail, and surfing the web-but do they know how to effectively find, evaluate, and use information appropriately?

Anecdotal information from faculty and librarians say "no"-that students just accept what they find on the Internet as credible, authoritative, and reliable-and that they can download and use information however they please.

That's one of the reasons why several colleges and universities are interested in assessing students' information and communication technology (ICT) skills-to see just how information and tech savvy students really are.

The California State University (23 campuses) and several other two and four-year higher education institutions have partnered with Educational Testing Service (ETS);www.ets.org to develop the ICT Literacy Assessment, a new performance-based, web-based, interactive tool designed to measure students' cognitive skills within a digital environment. Tasks reflect real-world scenarios, which engage students in demonstrating their knowledge, skills and abilities to define, access, manage, integrate, evaluate, create and communicate information.

Tasks cover such topics as:

comparing and summarizing information from the open web to content found in subscription databases, and then drawing conclusions from the summary
downloading and installing a simulated video player
synthesizing information from instant messages into a word processing document and
creating a graph that supports a particular point of view. These tasks simulate work that students have performed (or will perform) in the classroom or in the workplace.

Student feedback has been positive. They indicate that they have never taken a test like this before. They found the test to be challenging, that it required both thinking and technical skills, enjoyed the real-world storylines, and felt that the tasks reflected activities they had encountered at school, work or home.

So, why is the test important to institutions of higher education? It requires students to demonstrate their skills through critical reading, thinking and reflection (unlike multiple choice tests); helps institutions plan curriculum to address ICT literacy gaps; provides evidence for accreditation purposes; verifies ICT literacy skills that students need to enter the workforce or in graduate school; and has the potential to certify that graduates have the cognitive and technical skills needed by employers in this globally connected, multicultural world.

The California State University views ICT literacy as a foundational skill, similar to math and writing. Students entering any of the university campuses would do well to have these skills to be academically successful. That is the message that faculty have told us in Academic Literacy: A Statement of Competencies Expected of Students Entering California's Public Colleges and Universities (2000), produced by the inter-segmental committee of the Academic Senates of the California Community Colleges, the California State University, and the University of California