MAY/JUNE 2008 170278-6648/08/$25.00 © 2008 IEEE
T
oday’s students are generally considered tech-
savvy, armed with iPhones, laptop computers, and
TiVos at the ready. It is also a generation that has
transformed the trademarked name of the most
popular online search engine into a
verb—googling. Looking for background
information on that circuits paper?
Google it. Hankering for local
Thai takeout? Google it. The
googling response is nearly as
robotic as a classic 1980s
Devo tune: “If a problem
comes along, you must
Google it. When some-
thing’s going wrong, you
must Google it.”
However, if you Google
the term “information and
communication technology
(ICT) literacy,” you are apt to
find that students are signifi-
cantly lacking in that
exact skill set.
A c c o r d i n g
to preliminary research findings by Princeton, New Jersey-
based Educational Testing Service (ETS), only 52% of students
that took its iSkills assessment could correctly judge the objec-
tivity of a Web site and only 65% could properly judge the
site’s authoritativeness. When focusing on a Web search task,
only 40% entered multiple search terms to narrow the results
and when selecting a research statement for a class
assignment, only 44% identified a statement that cap-
tured the demands of the assignment.
The iSkills assessment was created by ETS with
the input of a consortium of librarians, profes-
sors, and administrators from college and uni-
versity systems to measure a student’s ability to
use critical thinking to define, access, manage,
integrate, evaluate, create, and communicate
information in a technological environment.
Information was gathered from more than
6,300 test takers at 63 four-year colleges and
universities, community colleges, and high
schools (seniors), who took the inaugural
iSkills assessment in 2006. Institutions
selected the students that would take the
assessment, with some electing to test
students enrolled in a particular course
and others using a random sampling
process or issuing an open invitation
and offering gift certificates as incentives.
“We’re defining ICT literacy uniquely,”
explains Irvin R. Katz, senior research sci-
entist at ETS. “We’re not focusing on
specific business applications or know-
ing how a computer works, which
are things that people think that stu-
dents are very good at. Instead,
we’re focusing on the skillful use of
information in the context of tech-
nology. That includes how well
students can deal with the over-
whelming information on the
Internet and other computer appli-
cations, how they navigate the infor-
mation landscape and find good
information—all those skills that have
been around for a while but are not
pure technology skills.”
While students may know their
way around the latest technology gad-
gets, the same acumen has yet to be
translated to the use of information that is
applied to that technology. The iSkills assess-
ment found that across several tasks, only a few
test takers could accurately adapt material for a
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPOT.2008.921819© DYNAMIC GRAPHICS
CRAIG
CAUSER
Googly
eyes: Students
sluggish with
ICT literacy
L O O K I N G T O T H E F U T U R E