Literary tests for a digital world

IHT - NY Times: "Students can find thousands of resources on the Internet - but as any teacher will attest, they are not always adept at sorting the wheat from the chaff.

Researching a term paper was once far simpler. A student writing about, say, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin might have checked out a book on the history of aviation from the local library or tucked into the family's encyclopedia. The more ambitious might also have looked up some old newspaper clips on microfilm or picked up a monograph in a school library.

Today, in a matter of minutes, students can identify these and thousands of other potential resources solely on the Internet - and as any teacher will attest, they are not always adept at sorting the wheat from the chaff. Now the Educational Testing Service, the nonprofit group behind the SAT, the Graduate Record Examination and other university entrance tests in the United States, has developed a test that it says can assess students' ability to critically evaluate the vast amount of material available to them.

The Information and Communications Technology literacy assessment, which will be introduced at about two dozen U.S. colleges and universities this month, is intended to measure students' ability to manage exercises like sorting e-mail messages or manipulating tables and charts, and to assess how well they organize and interpret information from many sources and in myriad forms. About 10,000 undergraduates at schools like the University of California-Los Angeles, and Bronx Community College in New York are expected to take the test during the first offering period, which ends on March 31.

Developing ways to measure how much students know - or how much they have yet to learn - has become a lucrative market. Eduventures, a research firm based in Boston, estimated the assessment market for prekindergarten through secondary school at $1.8 billion for 2003. Given the announcement on Wednesday by President George W. Bush that he plans to expand the standardized testing mandated under the No Child Left Behind Act, the market for assessments seems sure to grow.

Beyond the SAT, ETS controls a separate boutique market of higher-level tests like the Graduate Record Examination and the Graduate Management Admission Test. Despite its nonprofit status, it is the world's largest private educational testing and measurement organization. The company administers and scores nearly 25 million tests annually in more than 180 countries and posted $825 million in revenue for its last fiscal year.

In an extensive report titled, "Tech Tonic: Towards a New Literacy of Technology," published in September, the Alliance for Childhood, a nonprofit group that is often skeptical of technology in schools, was critical of the new test, saying, "For ETS, this is part of a broader global plan to develop and promote international technology literacy standards, and then offer countries around the world a chance to buy a full array of assessment products and services."

The technology test will cost universities about $25 a student. Students will take the Web-based exam in classrooms or instruction labs. Scores in the first round will be aggregated for each institution. Scoring for individual students is planned from 2006."