Assessment of 21st century ICT skills in Chile: Test design and results from high school level students

Abstract

This paper describes a study that evaluates fifteen-year-old Chilean students Information and Communication Technology (ICT) skills. The paper presents an operational definition of ICT skills, an instrument measuring these skills as well as the students' results in the test. The definition of ICT skills used considers Chile's curricular framework, functional and cognitive skills. Specifically, ICT skills were defined as the capacity to solve problems of information, communication and knowledge in digital environments. A performance-based assessment was designed in a virtual environment to measure these skills. The analysis of the results showed that the majority of students were able to solve tasks related to the use of information as consumers, i.e., approximately three quarters of the students were able to search for information and half of them were also able to organize and manage digital information. Additionally, they show that very few students were able to succeed in tasks related to the use of information as producers, i.e., only one third of the students were able to develop their own ideas in a digital environment and less than one fifth were able to refine digital information and create a representation in a digital environment. Socioeconomic group, access, daily use and confidence in doing ICT-related activities were all positively associated with higher scores, showing the need to implement strategies to compensate this inequality, possibly by explicitly defining these aims in the national curriculum.