Chapter Three: Practices and Contexts for Technology and Engineering Literacy
Introduction
Chapter Two described the assessment targets for technology and engineering literacy, both knowledge and skills that NAEP will assess. This chapter describes three generalizable practices that represent the kinds of thinking and application that will be expected of students across the three major assessment areas. The chapter also explains the contexts, or situations and types of problems, in which assessment tasks and items will be set. These three elements and their relationships are portrayed in Figure 2.
As indicated in Figure 2, the practices expected of students are general, cross-cutting reasoning processes that students must use in order to show that they understand and can use their technological knowledge and skills. The contexts in which technology and engineering literacy tasks and items appear will include typical issues, problems, and goals that students might encounter in school or practical situations. The particular knowledge and skills that are the targets of the assessment lie in the three assessment areas. Together, the assessment targets, practices, and contexts provide a structure for the generation of tasks and items. This chapter describes the practices and contexts in some detail and provides examples of the types of tasks and items that result when these three elements are combined. Some of these illustrative tasks and items were not developed by the original test program to assess technology and engineering literacy. Explanations are provided for such illustrative items for how the tasks and items could be modified to directly assess targets in this framework.
