The youth Digital Skills Performance Tests

Report on the development of real-life tasks encompassing information navigation and processing, communication and interaction, and content creation and production skills.

This report discusses the development of a high-quality measurement instrument – real-life performance testing – for a range of digital skills amongst young people with the overall aim of providing a comprehensive overview of the methodological issues that had to be addressed. Carefully designed and implemented performance tests measure actual actions and what is regarded as real-life ways of engaging with technology. Areas considered are the constraints of various types of performance tests and the coding and analytical procedures involved. The tests cover three different dimensions of skills: (1) information navigation and processing skills; (2) communication and interaction skills; and (3) content creation and production skills. The design of the performance tests is discussed in light of the findings of developing and testing cross-nationally compatible tasks.

The developed performance tests provide valuable insights into information navigation and processing, communication and interaction, and content creation and production skills. In addition, the development process itself provided valuable lessons for future applications. Based on crossnational experiences with the developed tests, this report demonstrates features of test development and application procedures to improve the quality of such assessments. Our experiences target specific issues of performance test development beyond the well-known disadvantages of being time and labour intensive. The aim is to expand knowledge on how to design a performance test and encourage other researchers to use this direct assessment method of digital skills.