Apparently ETS has created a test for a student’s skills and abilities handling, processing, evaluating, and communicating information in an internet environment. Navigating the virtual world is surely a second order skill, at least as valuable as the primary skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Knowing that kind of stuff just isn’t optional any more, and I suppose testing for it is the only way to force schools to accept that fact.

From CNN: Exam measures students’ ‘information literacy’

The ICT Literacy Assessment touches on traditional skills, such as analytical reading and math, but with a technological twist. Test-takers, for instance, may be asked to query a database, compose an e-mail based on their research, or seek information on the Internet and decide how reliable it is.

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Students will receive an individual score on a point scale of 400 to 700, and schools will get reports showing how students fare in seven core skills: defining, accessing, managing, integrating, evaluating, creating and communicating information.

The new “core” version that will be sold to high schools can be taken in a school computer lab over about 75 minutes and consists of 14 short tasks, lasting three to five minutes each, and one longer task of about 15 minutes. Students may be asked, for example, to determine what variables should go where in assembling a graph, and then use a simple program to create it. They could also be asked to research a topic on the Web and evaluate the authoritativeness of what they find.

Students “really do know how to use the technology,” said Dolores Gwaltney, library media specialist at Thurston High School in Redford, Michigan, one of a handful of high school trial sites for the test over the next few weeks. “But they aren’t always careful in evaluating. They go to a source and accept it.”

You can view a demo of the test, and it looks pretty good as far as standardized tests go. The evaluation bit is kind of sketchy, but at least this is a start.