April 26, 2005

Purdue pilots national information and technology literacy test

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Educational Testing Service, creator of the SAT, is administering a new test at several colleges, including Purdue University, that will help set the national benchmark on how efficiently 21st century college students are able to use information and communication technology.

"Technology has transformed the classroom, the workplace, the global economy and our lives and has become a critical life skill," said Teresa Egan, ETS's project manager for the new test. "Schools that effectively measure those skills can better evaluate the effectiveness of existing information and communication technology-based curricula."

Nationally, 8,000 students will take the computerized, simulation-based Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Literacy Assessment. The exam is designed to measure students' ability to define, access, manage, integrate, evaluate, create and communicate information in a technological environment. It consists of a series of tasks rather than multiple-choice questions.

Purdue University Libraries is part of ETS's National Higher Education ICT Development Committee. Purdue Libraries participated in an earlier field trial as well as this large-scale assessment, which is designed to create a robust assessment tool that can serve as a reliable measure of individual student achievement.

Alexius Macklin, associate professor of library science, said Purdue was chosen as a pilot testing location in large part because it has instituted information literacy as a core competency for all of its students. About half of the 500 students to whom Macklin is giving the test are enrolled in unique Purdue freshman English composition classes that require participants to create graphic representations, build Web pages and learn to use technology to communicate with different audiences.

Purdue Libraries partnered with Information Technology at Purdue in 2002 to create the Digital Learning Collaboratory, a facility and program that integrates technology and information literacy.

"The ETS Information and Communication Technology Literacy Assessment reflects the kinds of efforts we are already involved with," said Cheryl Kern-Simirenko, associate dean and director of public services and collections of the Purdue Libraries. "We are interested in using this tool to see whether it can help us evaluate the success of these collaborative efforts."

In years past, college students' access to information was limited to the books in their campus library with the card catalogue as the only search engine. The information available might be limited, but its provenance was known.

Thanks to the Internet and other technologies, students now have millions of sources of information at their fingertips. Without proper training, though, that might be more than they can prioritize or authenticate.

"Students feel as if they know how to do research because they can Google, but they don't necessarily know how to evaluate the search results or how to search scholarly resources licensed by the library," Kern-Simirenko said.

Purdue has taken several steps to address that challenge. Librarians from each of the university's specialized libraries visit classrooms to teach students research techniques. Libraries faculty members have been working for several years on pilot projects and workshops to develop ways for librarians and teaching faculty to work collaboratively.

"Librarians teach strategies for locating, retrieving and evaluating information," Kern-Simirenko said. "These are skills that will enable Purdue students to continually refresh their knowledge base long after they have graduated."

Testing concluded at Purdue on April 15. Individual test results will not be available, since the test instrument itself is still being assessed. Group scores will be compiled to create a baseline to compare to future test results.

Macklin has been administering the tests to students who have little memory of a world without the Internet and who also regularly do wireless research on laptops while lounging outdoors in the grass. Still, she was surprised that some of the students described the two-hour test with 18 multipart tasks as "fun."

"No one has ever said that an ETS test was fun," Macklin said. "So maybe we are onto something here at Purdue."

Writer: Jim Schenke, (765) 494-6262, jschenke@purdue.edu

Sources: Judith Schumaker, libraries development director, (765) 494-7987, jschumkr@purdue.edu

Cheryl Kern-Simirenko, (765) 494-2900, cks@purdue.edu

Alexius Macklin, (765) 494-0297, alexius@purdue.edu

Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu

To the News Service home page