The country’s 8th graders improved their scores on a national technology and engineering exam, with girls significantly outpacing boys and most gains seen among higher-performing students.
Overall, scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in Technology and Engineering Literacy (TEL) in 2018 were two points higher than when the National Center for Education Statistics first administered the exam in 2014. The share of students scoring proficient or above rose from 43 percent to 46 percent.
“Girls have done extremely well in this assessment,” said Peggy G. Carr, the associate commissioner of assessment at NCES. “We did not see improvement at the lower-end of our ability distribution.”
The TEL exam is administered every four years. Between January and March of 2018, 15,400 8th graders in about 600 schools took the assessment, which is given on laptop computers.
The test uses a mix of multiple-choice questions and scenario-based performance tasks. A sample task might involve students figuring out how to promote a fictional recreation center for teenagers—first selecting audio clips for a podcast, then identifying the key facts that will resonate with a target audience and giving constructive feedback to digital “partners.” The goal is to gauge not just students’ technical skills, but their ability to work well with others to solve real-world problems.
It was on those skills that girls dramatically outperformed boys, outscoring them by nearly 8 points on practices related to “communicating and collaborating.” Boys were particularly poor, for example, at properly crediting other people for their work and ideas, something they were significantly less likely to say they learned about or discussed in school.
“It suggests that maybe boys could do better, and this is a path forward for them, if we could help them improve in this area,” said Carr of NCES.
Encouraging Growth
Big-picture, the TEL exam is an outgrowth of two big trends in K-12: efforts to expand the pipeline of students into STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields, and experiments with new forms of digital assessment that aim to measure students’ problem-solving processes.
But TEL isn’t limited to students who aim to become engineers or computer scientists. And one of the purported benefits of its scenario-based tasks is that educators can’t teach specifically to the test.
Instead, the exam “is designed to address how well students have mastered the processes and tools they need to participate intelligently and thoughtfully in the world around them,” according to a frequently asked questions document released by the National Center for Education Statistics.
On that front, the widespread TEL gains are reason to be encouraged, officials said.
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