While a teenager can artfully describe how to download a movie released just last weekend and how avoid the entertainment police, can he build a spreadsheet that would make an Accounting professor weep?
The same folks that have been torturing students with ACT and SAT cruelty for eons, the Educational Testing Service (ETS), are trying out a new test that measures high schoolers’ ability to function outside the technical requirements of MySpace, iTunes, and Instant Messenger.
The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Literacy Assessment inflicts high pressure testing punishment on high school students at more than 25 community colleges, four-year institutions and high schools nationwide in a pilot test.
A new version, called the Core Level, is designed for students transitioning to college-level work and is the first version of the ICT used to break, I mean test, high school students.
The test measures not only knowledge of technology, but the ability to use critical thinking to define, access, manage, integrate, evaluate, create and communicate information beyond the usual “wtf?,” “omg” and “imho.”
Test takers are asked to perform information management tasks, such as extracting information from a database, developing a spreadsheet, or composing an e-mail based on research findings.
“Technology has transformed the classroom, the workplace, the global economy and our lives, and a student’s ability to thrive in a technological environment has become a critical life skill,” said Terry Egan, ETS’s ICT Project Manager, before shushing and glaring at the room.
“Schools that effectively measure those skills can better evaluate the impact of existing ICT-based curricula and identify areas in which ICT literacy resource allocations need to be placed.”
The ICT Literacy Assessment is made up of 14 short (four-minute) and one medium (15-minute) task and can be administered in approximately 75 minutes of silent abuse.
Students receive scores that identify their individual performance compared with other test takers’ scores from the same test administration. They also receive feedback on their performance for each of the seven proficiencies identified in the ICT Literacy framework.
The pilot testing will continue until February 17th.
10 seconds.
C, c, c, c, c, c, c, c, c
Pencils and mice down!
Let weeping and gnashing of teeth begin.
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