Digital Literacy and Digital Competences in the Educational Evaluation: USa and IEA Contexts

Notas do Editor

1. Good morning everybody, it´s a pleasure of mine being here, opening our track: Evaluation in Education and guidance with the paper Digital Literacy and Digital Competences in the Educational Evaluation: United States of America and International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement Contexts
2. The exchange and transformation of knowledge through information technologies is a feature of modern societies where different issues interact, transforming deeply the framework for the education development. In this essay we would like to focus on the assessement of new skills and digital literacy emerged and developed in the Knowledge Society.
3. So, if learning and teaching digital competences in the Networked Knowledge Society are important, their assessment become indispensable to monitoring, not only the students achievement, but even their properly integration in the Digital Era, assuring their success to face the challenges in the Knowledge Society.
4. We will focus on three main goals: A conceptual overview, secondly, a review about evaluation on digital competences in the context of the United States of America and ,at last, but not least a review about evaluation on digital competences in the context of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement . Both contexts are the most significant in the field of the digital competences assessments.
5. First of all we should introduce the concept of digital competence…
6. Digital competence was defined as: LEARNING AREAS: a set of habilities, skills, strategies, attitudes and values that are needed to use TOOLS: ICT and digital media in different COMPETENCE AREAS: maniging Information, comunication, content creation, safety and problem solving, in Effective and efficient WAYS with specific PROPOSALS in work, entertainment, collaboration, learning, interacting and consumption
7. Regarding to digital literacy is important to emphasize that is understood like a more holistic understanding, a prerequisite for creativity, innovation and enterpreneurship and without it citizens can neither participate fully in society. It could be said that digital literacy supposes new ways of mediating and representing the world and of communicating. So, if we consider necessary to train and teach a new literacy, moreover becomes essential assess it.
8. If we analyze the international context it could be found four specific evaluations on this field, three from the USA and one from the IEA as we can see in the graphic.
9. The iSkills assessment was firstly developed by ETS, Educational Testing Service, in 2002. The iSkills assessment measures students' ability to navigate, critically evaluate and make sense of the wealth of information available through digital technology — so teachers can make the necessary changes to narrow skill gaps. This kind of assessment is focused on higher education and the test score range is 0-500. ETS has recently introduced performance-level certificates for students taking the iSkills assessment. These certificates qualify the scores on the assessment in three different levels: a) DEVELOPING ICT LITERACY, FOUNDATIONAL ICT LITERACY, and ADVANCED ICT LITERACY Educational Testing Service is a nonprofit organization that advances quality and equity in education for people worldwide by creating assessments based on rigorous research. ETS develops, administers and scores more than 50 million tests annually in more than 180 countries, at more than 9000 locations worldwide. The main indicators of this assessment are:….
10. The Assessment and teaching of 21st Century Skills project, started in 2009, their main purpose was and is transform education in the 21st Century . It was launched by the University of Melbourne, CISCO Systems, Intel and Microsoft.The main scope of the project is not only evaluating the skills of students in the 21st century but introduce the learning in the curricula. The main indicators of the evaluation are: … The Technology and Engineering Literacy Assessment has been recently launched last year. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP, considered in 2013 that there were no standarized, nationally representative assessments to provide evidences of what students know about technology and engineering, so they design the TEL, Technological and Engineering Literacy assessment. They realized that technology had not been a focus of instruction and assessment in their educational system, particularly at elementary and secondary levels (as we have analyzed, there were specific assessments for ICT literacy in higher education from 2002, the iSkills Assessment), consequently they designed a new assessment. Although these three areas are central in the NAEP TEL assessment, they are not sufficient. Students are expected to be able to apply these areas across three different practices: a) understanding technological principles b) developing solutions and achieving goals c) communicating and collaborating
11. The ICILS, International Computer and Information Literacy Study, is a pioneering study because is the first international comparative assessment to emphasize on students´ acquisition of computer and information literacy, firstly launched in 2013 Two different strands were conceptualized to frame the skills and knowledge addressed in ICILS as shown in the graphic
12. Having in mind all things said before, we could say at last that the assessment on students´ digital competence is the first step to reach an acceptable level on these competences. So in the framework of the Network Society if digital skills are assessed they can be recognized, and if recognized, then, they can be required and integrated in the curriculum from the elementary school to the higher education. That would be a desirable goal in the short-term if we want to properly prepare new generations for the challenges of the 21st Century. After analyzing those examples the main conclusion is that these advances in the educational evaluation might serve as example to encourage other governments and policymakers to reinforce their national evaluation systems and follow the acquisition of digital competences of students in particular but even of citizens in general.