Assessing Digital Literacy as a Civic Skill in K-12 Classrooms

Responsible civic engagement in the 21st century requires the ability to evaluate the credibility of digital information, and there is a growing consensus that K-12 schools should teach students to be discerning consumers of online information. Research-based curricular approaches have emerged for teaching these skills, but educators currently lack the assessment tools needed to readily measure and track students’ mastery of them. In recent years, researchers in psychology and education have developed assessments to measure aspects of digital literacy among research participants. This chapter outlines three assessment approaches that have been employed in digital literacy research and discusses the strengths and limitations of each for use in K-12 settings.