New iSkills Set
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Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 4/25/2007
High schools and universities wanting to compare how their students shape up in technology literacy skills against others can now pull reports from the Educational Testing Service (ETS) with results from the newly dubbed iSkills test.
The Princeton, NJ-based ETS renamed the test this month, changing it from the previous title, the Information Communication and Technology Literacy Assessment, which the educational group first put on the market in 2005. "ITC is an industry name and we really wanted to contemporize it," says Mary Ann Zabrowski, ETS's Director of Product Management.
The 75-minute test is given on a computer, and goes over 15 different tasks, including asking students to identify Web sites that are unbiased, and having them write an e-mail that explains research findings.
ETS also released two new kinds of reports that schools can request with their own iSkills results, which compares test scores with other educational institutions that have 50 or more students. One of the reports gives an aggregate comparison of the general score from the test, while the other compares scores from each test. Since inception, approximately 150 institutions have purchased the test, says Zabrowski. "We see an increased number of organizations recognizing the urgency of this skill," says Zabrowski. "It's an important part of how we live and how we work."
