4. Organizing the domain

Once we had defined what was meant by ICT literacy and laid out the assumptions underlying that definition, the next step was to develop an organizing framework for ICT literacy. This is an important step because the way in which the domain is organized affects test design and the kinds of tasks that will be developed to provide evidence about the status of ICT literacy in a population of interest. The panel's task was to define the critical organizing categories for the domain of ICT literacy and how they were related.

In our definition of ICT literacy, we identified five components we view as essential for functioning in a knowledge society: accessing, managing, integrating, evaluating and creating information in a technology context. These components, represented in Figure 1, formed the initial organizational scheme for the domain of tasks that make up ICT literacy.