I wanted to read some more about our eighth-graders' performance on South Dakota's annual Technology Literacy Assessment, which I mentioned briefly Sunday.The article in Sunday's edition of that Sioux Falls paper headlined that two-fifths of our eighth-graders failed to score proficient or better on the test. As I look at the Department of Education's breakdown of the scores, I find some mixed signals.
On the good side, in six areas tested, our eighth-graders score highest in "digital citizenship." 56% of kids scored advanced in this area; another 15% scored proficient. The advanced scores in the other five areas don't come anywhere close to breaking 50%. The summary describes the following standards for "digital citizenship":
Students understand human, cultural, and societal issues related to technology and practice legal and ethical behavior. Students (a) advocate and practice safe, legal, and responsible use of information and technology; (b) exhibit a positive attitude toward using technology that supports collaboration, learning, and productivity; (c) demonstrate personal responsibility for lifelong learning; (d) exhibit leadership for digital citizenship.
Those are pretty lofty goals, and our kids rocked out at them. Such proficiency at safe, legal, and responsible use of information technology indicates that our teachers really are doing their jobs and that teachers and students really can interact safely and intelligently online. Maybe our schools don't need to go ape about locking down social media to protect kids from boogeymen.
Our kids' next best area was "technology operations and concepts." They are pretty good at doing specific tasks with technology. Scores drop another significant notch for "research and information fluency" and "communication and collaboration."
Our kids' lowest average scores came in two areas that have the broadest application: "creativity and innovation" and "critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making." These skills are the bedrock skills for students going into any career other than worker drone. Knowing which buttons to push is nice, but figuring out why the buttons aren't working and and designing better buttons (or a better machine with no buttons!) provide even more value for budding entrepreneurs. But teaching critical thinking and creativity in schools designed around the assembly-line business model is awfully hard.
* * *
I was curious just what questions the kids have to answer on the Technology Literacy Assessment. I follow the Department of Education's link to Learning.com, the vendor who apparently supplies the test that evaluates our kids' button-pushing prowess. The opening screen makes me laugh out loud. I add some green graffiti and share:
"Multiple choice questions allow students to demonstrate their 21st century skills""---generally, I think not.
To the test's credit, the multiple choice questions aren't too shabby. On the sample assessment, I found questions asking middle schoolers to evaluate the reliability of sources on consumer products and to determine whether a specific group task might be better achieved with a blog or a wiki. The test also offers performance-based questions, like inserting a video into a slideshow and performing a Boolean search on multiple terms in a library catalog.