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February 02, 2006
New Exam Aims to Measure Tech 'Literacy' (Yahoo! News)
The ICT Literacy Assessment touches on traditional skills, such as analytical reading and math, but with a technological twist. Test-takers, for instance, may be asked to query a database, compose an e-mail based on their research, or seek information on the Internet and decide how reliable it is.
[...]
The new "core" version that will be sold to high schools can be taken in a school computer lab over about 75 minutes and consists of 14 short tasks, lasting three to five minutes each, and one longer task of about 15 minutes. Students may be asked, for example, to determine what variables should go where in assembling a graph, and then use a simple program to create it. They could also be asked to research a topic on the Web and evaluate the authoritativeness of what they find.
[One of my colleagues in the English department is interested in how students use technology in and out of a classroom. I am impressed that one task on this assessment might be "to determine what variables should go where in assembling a graph," but I wonder how secondary education might pull that off, since rhetoric (even visual rhetoric) is not taught in schools. I know I had to wait until my third year of college work to even begin learning about rhetoric. BK]
Posted by kuechebj at February 2, 2006 11:52 PM