A holistic assessment would be of most interest to constituencies who wished to focus on how well a test taker completed a given set of tasks rather than on the component skills that make up those tasks. An example would be a task that required test takers to create a flyer for a neighborhood clean-up day. Specific task requirements as well as information such as when and where the event was to be held would be provided and test takers would be scored on how well they completed the final product. (A more detailed illustration of this task can be found in Appendix A.) Such an assessment would allow one to rank order groups or individuals and to make general statements about their ICT knowledge and skills.

Alternatively, one might choose to build an assessment that independently measured the knowledge and skills associated with each of the five components of ICT Proficiency (access, manage, evaluate, integrate and create). This component assessment would result in a measure that could provide general information about the kinds of generative ICT tasks a population, or an individual, could perform. An example of one such task and its associated proficiencies is presented below. (For a more detailed illustration of this task, see Appendix B.)

Scenario: Employees in your company have been asked to provide information about the technology training courses they have taken during the past year. They have sent e-mail messages to their supervisors and each supervisor has forwarded the information to the director of human resources. You've been asked to organize the information, evaluate the extent to which companybased courses are being utilized, and make a recommendation to the human resources department about which courses should be continued next year.