Literacy Debate

In a 2008 New York Times online article, Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading, Motoko Rich presents us with an interesting look at how adolescents today are transforming our traditional definition of literacy, and how students practice and develop literacy (Rich, 2008). She uses specific teenagers as case examples, includes thoughts from the parents, and presents multiple sides of the issue from various organizations and intellectuals involved in education and educational psychology. What counts as literacy? Literacy by definition is one’s ability to read and write. However, I do not believe that the ability of one to do so should only be taught, cultivated, applied, and assessed in a strictly traditional printed form. Doing so is ignoring the fact that the world is changing, and the needs of the 21^st century in terms of business, democracy,  and society includes a new digital literacy that requires people to search, sort, read, write, and evaluate incredible amounts of information that are being produced daily and modified by the hour. To infer that the Internet, digital forms of text, and new media are changing literacy in a negative way is a closed minded type of analysis of the issue. Yes, there is some research out there that suggests Internet usage may be correlated to a decline in test scores. However, that result in itself warrants close examination and scrutiny.

The fact that these assessment models are not written or updated to address digital literacy or text derived through new technologies and new media, is essentially a prescription for declining scores and an increase in failure rates. Research does suggest that the more a student reads for fun, the better they do on these test scores. The Internet is what students do for fun, like it or not, it’s fact, and unless we ban in the Internet, that is what students will spend their time on. Students can use the internet to read for fun, which should increase their test scores. However, test scores do not improve because new media literacy is a different animal, and unless the tests are rewritten to address new media literacy, we will still continue to see students struggle on those exams. There is a key concept in education when it comes to curriculum design. Curriculum should not be written or structured to prepare students for an assessment, more commonly referred to as “teaching to a test.” Curriculum starts by identifying what the student will need to know and what they will need to be able to perform when the curriculum is over, and the curriculum is then designed, developed, and implemented with that goal as the basis for everything. The assessment is not that goal. The assessment is a measurement tool used to determine how well students are working towards those goals. Therefore, literacy assessments that do not include 21^st century forms of reading and writing are a statement by the assessment creators that the world is not changing around them and that new media literacy is not important or relevant for career skills or for any forms of lifelong skills that contribute to a better society, which is delusional.

I offer the following example to help illustrate my point. The New York State Education Department requires students to use a graphing calculator on their standardized algebra assessments. What do you think would happen if NYSED forced students, during the NYS Regents exams for algebra, to use grid paper and pencil to make all of the graphs they need to answer the assessment questions? My guess is that the test scores would be drastically lower than they already are. Curriculum writers in mathematics along with math teachers started using graphing calculators back at least when I was in school (mid 1980s) if not before, because they knew that it was just as important for students to be able to analyze graphs as it was for them to make the graph, utilizing technology to make more graphs faster allowed them to do more analysis.  Now, a graphing calculator is a requirement by NYSED to take the NYS Regents exams for algebra. 

Careers, communities, governments, schools, organizations, the world as a whole, will need people to be digitally literate as we move forward. Curriculum should be adjusted to include both traditional forms of literacy along with new media literacy so that we are meeting those needs, and the standardized tests used to measure reading comprehension and writing abilities should be redesigned to include digital literacy. Let's stop "teaching to the test", start teaching to our needs, and create some tests that assess how well we are teaching to our needs.

REFERENCES  

Rich, M. (2008, July 27). Literacy debate: Online, r u really reading? The New York Times.  
 Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html?      
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