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There are many assessments that measure digital literacy skills and guess what? Lots of them also happen to align with Common Core State Standards. Some examples of and links to these ready-made digital literacy/technology assessments for students are:
- TRAILS-9 (Tools for Real-Time Assessment of Information Literacy Skills)
- Tech Literacy Assessment
- ETS iCritical Thinking (formerly iSkills, formerly ICT Literacy Assessment )
- Project SAILS
- iDCA (Digital Competence Assessment)
As if on cue, Learning.com has released an entire two-semester program called Project NextTech for high school students, which is designed to help, “high school students develop the technology proficiency, information literacy, and media literacy skills they need for success in our increasingly digital world.” It sounds all too familiar, doesn’t it? Pearson, Common Core, SBAC, Go Math! You name the product, there’s a marketing team somewhere working overtime.
I shouldn’t be so flippant - but I strongly believe that our kids are over-tested, over-scored, and over-measured. Do I believe that we need to know what skills our students are coming to us with? Yes. Do I believe that I should be able to show progress and growth throughout the course of the year? Absolutely. Do I believe that after thirteen years of public education, our students should have some evidence that they are proficient contributors and creators of content, able to collaborate and problem solve, and have significant knowledge of digital literacy? Without hesitation, yes.
The TRAILS-9 website says, ““We cannot say that the numeric score is a definitive measure of a student’s information literacy knowledge.” I agree that there are alternatives to prepackaged, commercial, standardized assessments that can be more effective and informative. Some very positive, student-centered, learner-driven methods to assess students’ digital literacy skills are:
- ePortfolios (my favorite)
- Rubrics (see The Reading Workshop)
- Blogging
- Inquiry-based learning
- Students choose format to demonstrate learning/skills
- Collaborative online projects
All students learn differently, and as we have seen with standardized testing of academic content areas such as reading and math, the one-size-fits-all approach does not work for every student. The same should hold true for assessing students’ skills in the evolving arena of digital literacy and technology skills. Our students are not test scores, and their competencies and literacies in the field of technology should not be quantified in that way.