Would You Pass the Information Literacy Test?

Grundelfeldsten writes "The Educational Testing Service -- the maker of the SAT and the GMAT -- has a new test called the Information and Communication literacy assessment. The test is designed to measure your "ability to make sense of the multiple streams of information that our computers throw at us every day," according to a Wired News reporter who just took it and described the process. The questions focus on completing tasks with Internet technologies, like using search engines efficiently and weeding out irrelevant email messages. Are such tasks really tied to technology? Or is "Information and Communication literacy" just a way for ETS to make money by selling more tests?"

Comments

in aus

[Anonymous Coward]

Most universities over here have this as a standard test for first year students, to make sure they can use search engines properly and also reference material properly.

Re:in aus

[Caff]

That's really surprising. Here in Canada, from my experience in first year, a lot of my classmates had still not discovered how to use search engines effectively. As for referencing material, we actually spent some time on that, for a writing class. The idea of a test that can evaluate the ability of students to process all this information is good, but I'm still skeptical as to whether the results would be accurate or useful.

Re:in aus

[Caff]

I think the use of enough keywords so that useful results come out when they enter their keywords in. Most of the time, when people ask me to find something for them, I usually tell them to try Google first. Most of the time, they pick search terms that are too broad, or don't bother doing simple things like putting quotes around phrases that they want, or just giving another keyword to narrow down the results, and end up getting all sorts of useless results. I've noticed this from some of my fellow students.

Re:in aus

[Adrilla]

There are ways to word questions to get the proper results. Sometimes the words you add or omit make a world of difference in what you get back. Using + and - signs. Find all words in a term, to make sure you get that term exactly instead of having some page comeback that has nothing to do with what you want, because it happened to have a couple of matching words in the result. Learning to correctly use a boolean search engine can make your internet life a lot simpler, and if you don't know the intracacies you should learn them, especially if you're a student.

"Are such tasks tied to technology"

[Dancin_Santa]

The unqualifiable answer to that question is an emphatic YES. The fact of the matter is that what we here on /. think of as "computer usage" is a far cry from what normal people with actual exposure to the sun and a plethora of IRL friends think. For us, a computer usage scenario includes hooking up and programming an LED disco light floor to our Linux laptop using USB 2.0 and getting it to spell 55378008.

The typical computer user gets online, checks his email, checks his stock prices, then gets back to his real life. Our real life revolves around computers, so such minimal usage seems strange and scary to us. However, it is actually what most users do.

You'd be surprised to learn that the computer usage scenario of the "real person" I described above is actually that of a "Power User". The typical person can barely turn the computer on, much less open Outlook Express without help from one of these Power Users. So, in fact, this test is useful as a step in the process of weeding out non-computer oriented hires.

I took this during trial period at my college

[Devistater]

I took this test when they were doing a pilot test at my college (they did the same at several colleges) a couple months ago. My college offered a $25 amazon gift card and a chance to win ipod. It took a couple hours to go through the whole thing, and the interface was kinda klunky. Plus at the end when I tried to fill out the comment part about the test it crashed the browser so I couldn't send my comments in lol. What was really cool was that they ended up sending out TWO amazon gift certificates (I think they accidently sent out an extra to everyone, perhaps some ppl complained because they entered wrong email to send the cards to or something) to me for $25. So I got paid $50 for a couple hours hehehe.

Re:SAT, ICT and Smoke Tests

[Guppy06]

"Carl Brigham, a bona-fide racist designed the SAT in 1925. "

Who wasn't racist in 1925? That was one of those wonderful interbellum years where the Klan hit its high water mark and Congress worked hard to decide who could immigrate and who could not (note that "Nordic" was specified; couldn't let those filthy Slavs, Italians or Iberians in, no matter what their skin color was).

It'd be pretty damned strange for someone doing anything in 1925 to not share those views. Why do you think Hitler was so popular in the US in the 1930's?

Wow

[TrappedByMyself]

Tried the demo and couldn't get past the first one. Too many words.
I can handle multiple streams of information just fine, but one bloated verbose thing obviously wipes me out.

I can really see the bias now that everyone talks about. I'm perfectly fine at processing large amount of information if I can read it in chunks. But this wordy spaghetti academic writing is too confusing for me. I had a flashback to the reading comprehension sections of the tests in school where I had to read over the same paragraph a dozen times before I could figure it out.
I can see how I did so awful in college, but am doing great in the real world.

Practice

[RocketRainbow]

I'm 21. I've had computers since I was 8, regular internet since about 12. I assume most people do. So why are some people naturally well disposed to figure out how to use search engines and email while others think of a computer as a magical device they cannot use?

I'd rather see a real assessment of the skills required to successfully use a computer as part of regular life - then test for these skills such as pattern matching, ability to follow complex instructions...

It's much more fair on people who have less computer access and more to the point, weeds out those who have real potential to do the job with a bit of instruction from those who will never do these things particularly well.

I'm also working on the idea of putting together a primer for people who don't understand what computers are for. They're often sold as appliances but with the multitude of functions they are supposed to have now, they obviously must be quite complex. Explaining the basics in clear language (including why we need such weird jargon) might help get people started on the right track instead of confusing themselves into a frenzy.

Re:Practice

[bkr1_2k]

"Fear is the mind killer." Or so they say. You're dead on with the courage thing though. All the members of my family that "need" computer help at least once a week call me. It's not that I'm necessarily smarter than they are, just that I'm willing to make a mistake and learn how to fix it myself. I don't let it bother me when I do something wrong, and they do.

People always ask me how I learned so much about computers and my simple answer is "I break them and then I fix them." That simple statement says a lot about the way I think versus the way the people who constantly need help think. I've taught people how to use man and help pages, discussion groups on the web, and plenty of other resources for fixing their own problems, but invariably I get the call anyway.

Now, it's what I do for a living, so I don't mind so much.

Re:Would I?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some group in the city I live in recently decided to try to measure the "computer literacy" of its residents. Being young enough to have had typing in elementary school (though at that point I was already writing toy programs at home) and a computer literacy class in middle school (which was really BASIC on an Apple //e) and given that I continue to work with computers for fun and profit, I figure I'd do okay. Well, I did, but I can see how someone could get a poor score while really being very literate. Many of the questions were specific to Windows XP with the default theme without mentioning Windows anywhere. Other questions were specific to Microsoft Word (including the one question I got wrong asking which menu an item for setting some feature I've never used is under) again, without mentioning Word, and there were other questions where the question itself was wrong.

Those issues aside, the test was only available through a Web site, so if you don't know how to open a Web browser and type in the URL, you can't take the test. Clearly, the test is not really designed to measure the computer literacy of city residents. Rather, the test was designed to make city residents look computer literate. Many of us are. You can go into a coffee shop and see cute girls hacking code, business people checking email and baseball scores over the public WiFi, and middle aged housewives talking about how they tell their grown kids how to avoid phishing (they don't say phishing). Of course, you would never know any of that from the test for our city.

I doubt the information literacy test is really any better. Of course, questions that are specific to one operating system or one program aren't really all that useful. Things that don't change all that often (like how to use UNIX core utilities in a shell) tend to be the things that most users don't need or want to know whereas the systems and programs that people do tend to use (like Windows or an email program) have changed a lot over the past decade. Seach engines? Okay, so you use Google now, but how many search engines have been your standby search site over the years? And now, of course, the big thing is integrating search into applications and who knows where this is all going in the future? Testing the tools we use now isn't that useful. I suppose the best way to test computer/information literacy would be to put the test subject in a computing environment they are not familiar with and asking them to accomplish some simple task any way they'd like to. Possible solutions to a problem might be playing with the system until it becomes minimally familiar and then do the task, locating and reading the documentation to discover how the task might be accomplished before attempting it, or installing a familiar environment in place of the unfamiliar one and accomplishing the task.

Paper tests are worthless

[kdougherty]

Just like most certification exams... Just because you can do it on paper, doesn't mean jack when it comes to "real-world" applications. Another student in my class passed his CCNA, but you should've seen him trying to configure the 2500. It was a joke! Experience in the best teacher, I'd like to see more "hands on" testing.

Re:Congratulations

[Anonymous Coward]

Please dont call the people that do that web designers. they are not.

Anyone that does that crap is a web-poser or wannabe.

I have respect for the real web designers out there, you know, the type that test to standards, make sure it's useable and readable and compatable.

coding to IE only is a sign of poser as well as desiging on your 21 inch monitor and wondering why other dont like it when you use small fonts.

There are more posers and wannabe's in the webdesign world than there is in the IT world, it's just they get to act like spoiled brats.

but honor and respect the real designers, they produce useable and compatable sites and pages.

Re:Universities NEED This Test

[Spad]

When I started my Computer Engineering degree a couple of years ago, we had to sit through a standard "Intro to computing test", featuring the use of Word, Excel and Notepad (For the Intro To HTML section).

There were people who *failed* it.

That's right, people doing a degree in Computer Engineering who failed *using Word*. Some of those people now have a BEng and still cannot use a word processor, let alone anything more complex.

I feel sorry for anyone who might hire them.

Re:Universities NEED This Test

[izomiac]

At my university you can only test out of the first intro course. Unfortunately, the testing software sucks and demands that you do things the exact way taught in the class (which you haven't taken). AFAIK, nobody's been able to pass it. From what I've seen, it's really annoying and Microsoft-centric. For instance, in Word, pressing Alt, T, W would be an incorrect way to spell check a document (something I'm sure it asks).

Re:A Simple, Yet Effiective Solution

[jschottm]

It works like this. Everybody is evaluated in terms of academic performance after then 10th grade. Anybody with a GPA of 3.0 and higher can move on further.

Ever hear of grade inflation? I'd be willing to bet that you'd find that wealthier areas would tend to have disproportionately high QCAs. Keep a rich person's parent from going onto 10th grade, and daddy calls his buddy on the school board and all of a sudden you [the teacher] don't have a job any more. After all, little Johnny is just too busy with all of his extracuricular activities that the ivy league schools want to see to pay attention to your class.

Further, the system you describe institutionalizes poverty and failure. The kids most likely to do well are the ones who have supportive parents and stable home lives. The children of parents who have to work two minimum wage jobs to get by are likely to do worse than the children of engineers who can either help them with homework or hire tutors, let alone children of drug addicts or the like. So the worse off kids are denied the opportunity to better themselves and go on to have kids that suffer the same problems. It also favours schools in metropolitan areas that offer many honors and AP level classes (which are factored higher in GPAs than normal classes - honors A == 4.5 and AP A == 5), while many rural schools can't offer those classes simply due to smaller budgets and class sizes.

The US education system certainly has many problems, but what you advocate would make them worse, not better.

Oh, that's not the worst.

[Grendel Drago]

I work at a phone support desk. When we ask people to power-cycle their computers, we have to tell them to power-cycle that little box under the desk, where they put the floppy disks in. Not the monitor.

Why, oh why, is this paradigm so hard to imagine? Take the (Monitor, Computer, Keyboard) tuple, and map it to the (Television, DVD Player, Remote Control) tuple. Why, exactly, is the latter so much easier to understand than the former?

Bah. Pet peeve of mine.

More on-topic, folks back in school used to blink and ask how on earth I managed to flick between windows, minimize them and so forth so quickly, without touching the mouse. They really thought that "Alt-Space, N" was magic. Someone once wrote that a single mouse move-and-click is equivalent to about eighteen keystrokes by a competent typist. The mouse is a good tool for some tasks, but it's frequently not even close to the right tool for the job.

--grendel drago