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NONPRINT LITERACY STANDARDS FOR ASSESSING TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATION

Karen Swan, Dawn E. Cocks, Rachel Gorney & Jennifer Richardson
Center on English Learning & Achievement (CELA)
University at Albany

For the past several centuries, the dominance of print over other forms of communication media has been overwhelming and largely unchallenged. Recent decades, however, have witnessed rapid changes in how we communicate with one another, entertain ourselves, conduct business, get information, create knowledge, and generally make sense of the larger world. Electronic texts are everywhere replacing printed ones as the media of choice in a wide range of human endeavors. Our notions of what it means to be literate are correspondingly expanding.

For example, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the International Reading Association (IRA) state in their summary of the national Standards for the English Language Arts,
". . . being literate in contemporary society means being active, critical, and creative users of print and spoken language, as well as the visual language of film and television, commercial and political advertising, and more. It also means being able to use an array of technologies to gather information and communicate with others." (National Council of Teachers of English / International Reading Association, 1996a, p. 2).
They accordingly address listening, viewing, telecommunications, computing, and visual representation skills in their standards documents. Similar sorts of competencies are similarly addressed by national educational standards documents in a variety of subject areas, as well as in most state educational standards.

Indeed, as we find ourselves on the eve of a new millenium, the question of whether or not we should be using new media technologies in our nation's classrooms has changed into that of how we can best integrate their use across the curriculum. The President's Panel on Educational Technology, for example, contends that
"The probability that elementary and secondary education will prove to be the one information-based industry in which computer technology does not have a natural role would at this point appear to be so low as to render unconscionably wasteful any research that might be designed to answer this question." (Panel on Educational Technology, 1997, p. 93-94)
They go on to argue for research "aimed at assessing the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of specific educational approaches and techniques that make use of technology," (p. 94) and state,
"Since researchers, educators, and software developers can be expected to develop content and techniques that optimize student performance with respect to whatever criteria are employed to measure educational attainment, progress will depend critically on the development of metrics capable of serving as appropriate and reliable proxies for desired educational outcomes, and enjoying reasonably widespread acceptance by researchers, educators, parents, and legislators." (Panel on Educational Technology, 1997, p. 90)
This paper explores the notion that the desired outcome of current K-12 technology initiatives, such as, for example, the President's Technology Learning and Technology Literacy Challenges (Executive Office of the President, 1996), is, in fact, technology integration across the curriculum. It argues that technology integration across subject areas and grade levels can best be measured in terms of nonprint literacy competencies. To such ends, it presents a possible set of performance-based, nonprint literacy competencies to be used as standards for guiding and assessing technology integration across the K-12 curriculum.

The work presented in this paper was undertaken by the Technology and Literate Thinking Strand of the National Research Center on English Learning and Achievement (CELA). CELA is dedicated to improving the teaching and learning of the English language arts. CELA focuses on the literacy necessary to write about, talk about, and extract meaning from knowledge (as represented in a variety of media) and experience. CELA's Technology and Literate Thinking group is concerned with the role of technology in achieving such literacy. Its research focuses on two interrelated questions:


Technology Integration Across the Curriculum

The Panel on Educational Technology was organized in 1995 to provide independent advice to the President on the application of a variety of technologies, telecommunications and computing in particular, in K-12 education in the United States. Its report, published two years later, was based on a review of the research literature, and on briefings and written submissions from a wide range of researchers, educational practitioners, software developers, and representatives of governmental agencies, professional societies, and industries involved in various ways with technology in education. The report presents the six "high level strategic recommendations" that its authors deemed most important. The first of these is: "1. Focus on learning with technology, not about technology." They write,
". . . it is important to distinguish between technology as a subject area and the use of technology to facilitate learning about any subject area. . . . Although universal technology literacy is a laudable national goal, the Panel believes the Administration should work toward the use of computing and networking technologies to improve the quality of education in all subject areas." (Panel on Educational Technology, 1997, p. 128)
And the second recommendation is like unto it: "2. Emphasize content and pedagogy, and not just hardware." They write,
". . . a less obvious (and in some ways, more formidable) challenge will be the development and utilization of demonstrably useful educational software and information resources, and the adaptation of curricula to make effective use of technology. Particular attention should be given to . . . new pedagogic methods based on a more active, student-centered approach to learning that emphasizes the development of higher-order reasoning and problem solving skills." (Panel on Educational Technology, 1997, p. 128)
The Panel distinguishes between isolated "computer education" education course, which teach students about computers and computer related basic skills, and the integration of meaningful and creative uses of computer technology throughout K-12 education. "The greatest promise of educational technology," they write, "lies in the possibility of utilizing computers and networks as an integral part of virtually all aspects of the curriculum." (Panel on Educational Technology, 1997, p. 116). In particular they advocate using technology to help students develop "the ability to acquire new knowledge, to solve real-world problems, and to execute novel and complex tasks." (p. 115)

Indeed, changes in communications technologies over the past century have created a world culture that has extended and reshaped our symbolic environment. As early as 1964, Marshall McLuhan called it "the global village." Today, most Americans receive the majority of their news, information, and entertainment through electronic sources. It only makes sense that we should teach our children to use those sources well. It only makes sense that we should make the use of electronic media an integral part of day to day activities in every classroom in this country. In fact, technology integration in education is the goal of the current administration's Educational Technology Initiative (1996). In this year's (1999) State of the Union Address, President Clinton contended that, ". . . every classroom in America must be connected to the Information Superhighway, with computers, and good software, and well-trained teachers," and announced his intention to bring Internet access to "every classroom and every library in the entire United States by the year 2000."

Of course, Internet access does not technology integration make. The section that follows argues for the importance of developing standards for guiding and assessing technology integration in our classrooms. In particular, it argues for standards both that address critical and creative, and not just basic, use of electronic media and nonprint texts, and that can be applied across the curriculum. It concludes that nonprint literacy standards best meet that goal.

Standards for Technology Integration

Diane Ravitch (1995) writes, "A standard is both a goal . . . and a measure of progress toward that goal" (p. 7). She continues, "Standards tell everyone in the educational system what is expected of them; assessments [of standards] provide information about how well expectations have been met" (p. 27). Arguably, technology integration standards of this sort are needed for the use of electronic media to become an integral part of the daily activities undertaken in America's classrooms.

The Panel on Technology (1997), for example, notes that, for the most part, the use of computers in American schools involves either learning about technology or is focused on drill and practice in basic skills. Most computers, they found, are located in isolated "computer rooms." Other national studies have reported similar findings (Becker, 1994; Educational Testing Service, 1998). Researchers agree that the biggest reason for such under-utilization is lack of understanding. Our own research (Swan, et. al., 1997) suggests that teachers just don't know how to make computers and communication technologies an integral part of day to day learning in their classrooms. Technology integration standards would provide needed guidance.

It is also our belief that nonprint literacy standards can best meet all the above criteria. They are not content specific and can be developed for differing grade levels. They generally include critical and creative uses of nonprint media. They are by definition concerned with literacy and the responsible use of information. They can be written at an appropriate level of specificity.

The following section describes our development of nonprint literacy standards for assessing technology integration. The next section presents those standards.

Development of Nonprint Literacy Performance Standards

Diane Ravitch writes, " . . . those who develop national standards should recognize their role is to discover and explain the very best existing standards, not to invent new and untried ones" (xxvi). In the case of nonprint literacies, three more than adequate sets of national standards collectively identify competencies in the use of nonprint media experts and practitioners believe students should have by the completion of elementary, middle, and high school. These are:
These three sets of standards were chosen because they were national in scope and constructivist in approach, and because they all addressed technological competencies as part of a larger notion of literacy. The three sets taken together address technological literacy, information literacy, and literacy in general. In addition, all three sets of standards were developed by the leading professional organizations in their fields of interest, and revised through an extended open process that included parents, teachers, administrators, software developers, and media specialists as well as educational technology experts. The sections that follow describe each set and tell how individual performance-based competencies were derived from them.

The Technology Foundation Standards for Students were developed by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), the leading professional organization for people specializing in technology and K-12 education, as part of the larger National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) Project. The NETS Project is co-sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Milken Exchange on Educational Technology, and Apple Computer.

The Technology Foundation Standards for Students are organized into six broad categories -- basic operations and concepts; social, ethical, and human issues; technology productivity tools; technology communications tools; technology research tools; and technology problem-solving and decision-making tools - containing fifteen general standards all together. These, in turn, are linked to performance indicators, called "Profiles for Technology Literate Students," which describe the technology competencies students should exhibit by the completion of the second, fifth, eighth, and twelfth grades. Ten performance indicators are given for each level of literacy.

The Technology Foundation Standards for Students performance indicators frequently address multiple standards categories and multiple media. Multiple competencies, therefore, were frequently extracted from single profiles to focus on individually observable behaviors in the lists we developed. Profiles of students completing the second and fifth grades were collapsed to form a single set of competencies for the elementary level. Performance indicators for students completing the eighth and twelfth grades were assigned to middle school and high school levels respectively. The Technology Foundation Standards for Students performance indicators are understood as cumulative; that is, by the completion of high school, students should have acquired all of them. These performance indicators formed the foundation of the nonprint literacy competencies we developed, thus, their cumulative approach was maintained.

The Information Literacy Standards for Student Learning were developed by the American Association of School Librarians and the Association for Educational Communication and Technology. They address information literacy competencies not addressed by the NETS Technology Foundation Standards. The Information Literacy Standards are broken into three general categories - information literacy, independent learning, and social responsibility - that consist of three standards each. Several performance indicators (twenty-nine in all) are given for each standard, and for each of these, three levels of proficiency are described. These performance descriptions are at level of specificity suitable to direct observation and roughly identify what students should be able to do on completion of elementary, middle, and high school. They were thus included in the lists of nonprint literacy competencies almost as they were.

The Standards for the English Language Arts were developed by the International Reading Association (IRA) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). They address literacy in general, but place nonprint competencies squarely within this category, i.e.,
"Changes in technology and society have altered and will continue to alter the ways in which we use language to communicate and to think. Students must be prepared to meet these demands." (National Council of Teachers of English / International Reading Association, 1996a, p. 2).
Hence, we felt, these standards helped situate nonprint literacy within the broader category of literacy in general. The Standards for the English Language Arts, for example, focus on meaning making across media, a concept ignored in the other standards we used.

The Standards for the English Language Arts consist of twelve very broad standards, elaborations on these, and a series of classroom vignettes that illustrate how the standards might be manifest in classroom settings. As above, they recognize the importance of nonprint media and computing and communications technologies in their various statements. Although the twelve standards are quite general in scope, and, in fact, have been criticized for their lack of specificity, their elaborations provide specific instantiations of nonprint media competencies that, when broken out individually, can be directly observed and address certain critical and creative abilities not elsewhere described. Thusly appropriated, such competencies were included in the nonprint literacy standards being developed.

Once all the nonprint media competencies found in these three sets of standards had been identified, they were reworked to simple expressions of observable performances (open to local interpretation), and redundancies among them were eliminated. The resulting performance standards were then sorted into three categories - basic skills, critical literacies, and construction skills -- to reflect the kinds of competencies many experts believe students should be developing around nonprint media (see the Panel on Educational Technology, Report to the President on the Use of Technology to Strengthen K-12 Education in the United States. 1997). These categories are described in the section which follows, and specific performances for each category are given. The lists of standards should be understood as tentative, but we believe they provide a good starting point for assessing technology integration in our schools. In particular, the sorting of the standards into basic skills, critical literacies, and construction skills provides a way of assessing not just the extent but the quality of technology integration efforts. The final section of this paper explores ways in which the standards might be used.

Nonprint Literacy Performance Standards

In this section, nonprint literacy standards are given as lists of competencies students should have by completion of elementary, middle, and high schools. The competencies have been broken into three categories: basic skills, critical literacies, and construction skills.

Basic skills are competencies involving the use and simple manipulation of non-print media and the recognition of common conventions used by them. They include competencies related to accessing, decoding, encoding, locating, etc. In the list which follows, the basic skills students should have by completion of elementary, middle, and high school are given, in that order. The skills should be understood as cumulative; that is, by the completion of high school, students should have acquired all of them.

NONPRINT LITERACY STANDARDS
BASIC SKILLS*

Critical literacies are competencies concerned with the ability to interpret, critique, and evaluate non-print texts, to synthesize information found within them, and to apply them in solving problems and increasing personal understandings. They include such abilities as making sense, analyzing, evaluating, applying, etc. The critical literacies students should have by completion of elementary, middle, and high school are listed below. They should be understood as cumulative.

NONPRINT LITERACY STANDARDS
CRITICAL LITERACIES*

Construction skills are competencies involving the creation and use of non-print texts for developing ideas and opinions, for communicating and collaborating with others, and for enhancing problem solving and personal fulfillment. Construction skills include capabilities for composing, developing, integrating, presenting, etc. The construction skills students should have by completion of elementary, middle, and high school are presented in the list which follows. The skills should be understood as cumulative.

NONPRINT LITERACY STANDARDS
CONSTRUCTION SKILLS*


Guiding and Assessing Technology Integration

The above nonprint literacy standards can be used in several differing ways to guide and assess technology integration. Most importantly, they provide lists of authentic and observable performances that focus on basic, critical and construction skills. They can thus be used to guide and assess not only the extent but the quality of technology integration. We think this is particularly important when experts suggest that critical and constructive uses of technology are more likely to foster learning than basic uses (Panel on Educational Technology, 1997; Educational Testing Service, 1998).

We imagine the standards being used in a variety of different ways. Because assessment clearly guides implementation, only the assessment of technology integration is discussed in the paragraphs that follow. Guidance, however, should be understood as entailed therein.

To begin with, the nonprint literacy standards detailed above could be used to document and qualify technology integration in classrooms. Such documentation would be a necessary first step in any study of the effects of technology integration on learning, such as those called for by the Panel on Educational Technology (1997). It might be an end in itself, as in, for example, documenting the use of technology for reporting on grants aimed at technology integration. Because the standards can be applied across subject areas and grade levels, they can be applied across the curriculum and/or used to compare technology integration using a variety of variables.

On another level, the nonprint literacy standards could be used to assess professional development activities, such as those mandated by the President’s Technology Literacy Challenge (Executive Office of the President, 1996). It stands to reason that the ways in which teachers are trained to use electronic media will be reflected in the ways they use such media in their own classrooms. We have seen too many professional development programs that focus on basic skills, and too few that even address critical and creative uses nonprint media. The standards might be used to correlate professional development with classroom uses of nonprint media on a qualitative basis. They might also be used to document what teachers have learned in professional development programs. Both uses facilitate the comparison of differing models of professional development

Finally, the nonprint literacy standards could be used to assess student learning. After all, the ultimate aim of any technology integration or professional development program is that students will develop competencies in the use of electronic media. We believe that for them to grow into productive workers and responsible citizens of the 21st Century, they will need to be able to do more than just use nonprint media. We believe “. . .it is the sophisticated analysis, evaluation and the active creation of messages that are the most significant, complex and vital skills needed for survival in an information age.” (Hobbs, 1998, p. 5) The nonprint literacy standards assess student learning of such skills and distinguish between them and more basic competencies.

Preparation of this report was supported under the Educational Research and Development Center Program (Grant Number R117G10015) as administered by the Office of Research, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education. The findings and opinions expressed in it do not necessarily reflect the position or policies of the funding agency.

KAREN SWAN received her doctorate in Instructional Technology from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is an associate professor of the same at the University at Albany Graduate School of Education where she is also Director of the Learning Technologies Laboratory and the Summer Technology Institute. Dr. Swan’s research has been focused mainly in the general area of computers and education. She has published and presented both nationally and internationally on programming and problem solving, computer-assisted instruction, hypermedia design, multimedia, and asynchronous online learning. She has also written on social learning from broadcast television, about which she co-edited a recently published book. Dr. Swan has authored several hypermedia programs including Set On Freedom: The American Civil Rights Experience for Glencoe and The Multimedia Sampler for IBM, as well as three online courses which are being offered through the SUNY Learning Network. She is a project director in the Technology and Literate Thinking Strand of the National Research Center on English Learning and Achievement (CELA) and is currently working on formative and usability evaluation for Project Links at RPI. Dr. Swan serves on the program committees for several local and international instructional technology conferences and is the Special Issues Editor for the Journal of Educational Computing Research.

For more information or to comment on this paper, visit the CELA website at: http://www.albany.edu/cela

References

American Association of School Librarians (1998) Information Literacy Standards for Student Learning. Chicago: American Library Association. http://www.ala.org/aasl/ip_nine.html

Becker, H. J. (1994) Analysis and Trends of School Use of New Information Technologies. Washington, DC: US Congress Office of Technology Assessment. http://www.gse.uci.edu/EdTechUse/c-tblcnt.htm

Clinton, W. J. (January 23, 1999) State of the Union Address. Washington, DC: US Capitol. http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/New/other/sotu.html

Educational Testing Service (1998) Does it Compute? Princeton, NJ: Education Week. http://www.whitehouse.gov/edtech.html

Hobbs, R. (1998) Literacy in the information Age. In Flood, J. Lapp, D. & Heath, S. B. (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Teaching Literacy Through the Communicative and Visual Arts. International Reading Association. New York: Macmillan, 7-14. http://interact.uoregon.edu/MediaLit/FA/mlhobbs/infoage.html

International Society for Technology in Education (1998) National Educational Technology Standards for Students. Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education. http://cnets.iste.org/overview.html

National Council of Teachers of English / International Reading Association. (1996a) Professional Summary; Standards for the English Language Arts. http://www.ncte.org/standards/profsum.html

National Council of Teachers of English / International Reading Association. (1996b) Standards for the English Language Arts. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: New American Library.

Panel on Educational Technology. (1997) Report to the President on the Use of Technology to Strengthen K-12 Education in the United States. Washington, DC: President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology. http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/EOP/OSTP/NSTC/PCAST/k-12ed.html

Ravitch, D. (1995) National Standards in American Education: A Citizen’s Guide. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press..

Swan, K., Meskill, C., Bowman, J., Mossup, J., Holmes, A.., Mann, S., Cardillo, D. and Kenyon, K. (1997) Redefining literacy for the Information Age. Brockport, NY: CIT ’97: Learning With Technologies, 114-115.




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