The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) stipulates that all students should be technologically literate by the end of the eighth grade. But how to assess technological literacy has proven to be a complex challenge for school leaders.

Organizations such as the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) have created standards that define what it means for students to be tech literate and to exhibit so-called 21st-century skills. But “it’s one thing to have these standards,” explained Karen Cator, director of leadership for Apple Inc. “Now, we have to learn how to measure and assess these skills.”

Cator was speaking March 10 at an annual conference hosted by the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN). At a session titled “Assessing 8th Grade Technology Literacy: How Are Districts and States Meeting the Requirements of NCLB?,” school technology specialists heard from ed-tech leaders in West Virginia and North Carolina, who discussed how their states are trying to meet the challenge.

Each of the two states approaches the challenge differently. While North Carolina uses an actual test to determine whether students are proficient with technology, West Virginia is using the idea of embedded assessment to gauge students’ skills by looking at how they use technology in the context of the curriculum.

Brenda Williams, executive director of the West Virginia Department of Education’s office of technology, said she believes students first must acquire knowledge, then they must deepen that knowledge, and finally they must create new knowledge from what they have learned.

And it’s during this last step that students can demonstrate their understanding of not only the curriculum, but also the technology tools that facilitate the creation and sharing of knowledge, she said.

“In West Virginia, the foundation for good assessment is first providing comprehensive professional development to teachers and administrators,” said Williams.

Classroom content must be engaging and include opportunities for real-life problem solving, she said, but it also must provide active data that can be used to measure students’ understanding. And educators must be taught how to interpret these data.

West Virginia is one of a handful of states that have teamed up with P21 to redesign their standards and curriculum to foster the development of 21st-century skills. West Virginia has aligned these standards and curriculum with ISTE’s National Educational Technology Standards (NETS), a broad framework for what students should know about, and be able to do with, technology at various grade levels.

“We’ve created and re-created content. We’ve created and re-created assessments,” said Williams. “The key is to try and keep up as much as possible.”

For example, in looking for tools that educators could use to assess students’ technology skills, West Virginia started with Oregon Trail—a simple, multiple choice-like computer game. Then, the state’s teachers moved to Sims City—“which was innovative, but more edutainment than anything,” Williams said. Now, educators are using River City, a multi-user virtual environment developed by researchers at Harvard University—“a game that not only interests students, but is based on education, problem-solving, and pulls active data,” she said.

“It’s so key to constantly scrub assessments,” echoed Cator, “because what an eighth grader needs to know in eighth grade this year, fifth graders will probably be proficient in next year.”

To create viable 21st-century assessments, Williams said, West Virginia established a small pilot program with two dozen schools. The state also formed a committee with a representative from each school to provide input on what the assessments should measure and how.

In the first year of this pilot program, 12 schools were deemed proficient and 12 were not. (“Proficient” was defined as having a certain percentage of eighth graders demonstrating technological literacy.) What’s more, the results directly correlated to whether the schools had a high percentage of students that receive free or reduced-price lunches.

As a next step, the state is preparing to focus on whether a lack of home internet access also has a direct correlation to poor achievement, Williams said.

Francis Bradburn, former director of the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction’s instructional technology division, said North Carolina has included a computer skills test for eighth graders since 1995, but now some organizations are trying to do away with this testing.

“Our major problem now is just trying to keep this testing going until a new 21st-century technology test can be incorporated,” said Bradburn.

North Carolina’s computer-skills test incorporates both multiple choice and performance-based assessment. It measures desktop publishing and spreadsheet skills, as well as how well students can navigate various applications.

“We want to ensure that all areas are covered, because that’s the way the real world is,” Bradburn explained.

A word of advice from the panelists: Start teaching the skills students need to master before the end of the eighth grade by at least the second grade, if not sooner.

Concluded Cator, “These tests will not only help eighth graders going into ninth grade; [they’ll] help educators better teach future generations.”

(Editor’s note: For more news from CoSN’s 2008 K-12 School Networking Conference in Arlington, Va.—including a debate over cell-phone use in schools—see our online Conference Information Center.)

Links:

Consortium for School Networking

International Society for Technology in Education

Partnership for 21st Century Skills

Apple Inc.

West Virginia Department of Education

North Carolina Department of Public Instruction

Note to readers:

Don’t forget to visit the “Creating the 21^st Century Classroom”resource center. Preparing today’s youth to succeed in the digital economy requires a new kind of teaching and learning. Skills such as global literacy, computer literacy, problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, and innovation have become critical in today’s increasingly interconnected workforce and society--and technology is the catalyst for bringing these changes into the classroom. Go to Creating-the-21st-century-classroom