ETS research finds college students fall short in demonstrating ICT literacy: National Policy Council to create national standards

Abstract

Educational Testing Service (ETS) released preliminary research that is consistent with a suspicion long held by those in academia: while students may be tech savvy when it comes to entertainment, they may not have the critical thinking skills to per-form the kinds of information management and research tasks necessary for academic success. The research, gathered from 6,300 students who took ETS’s ICT Literacy As-sessment in 2006, suggests that many of the students who participated lack some of the information and communication technology (ICT) literacy skills expected for college-level work: on average, students earned only about half the points that they could have earned on the test.