E-assessment offers many opportunities to broaden the range of tools at the assessor's disposal and thereby improve the overall accessibility of the assessment experience. In 2006, TechDis commissioned a report, produced by Edexcel, on the state of guidance on accessibility at the various stages of the assessment process--question design,…

This article presents an evaluation of the Bridging the Digital Divide Program, an intervention in five inner-city Chicago Catholic schools during one school year conducted by a local university. The interventions included (a) instillation of technology and (b) professional technology skill development for in-service teachers. The analysis…

The research presented in this report offers new insights about the relationship between changes in adult literacy and changes in employment and earnings. This paper will first describe the design and methodology of the Longitudinal Study of Adult Literacy (LSAL) and then present the key findings from LSAL about individuals' literacy growth over…

Over the past decade and a half, free access to computers and the Internet in U.S. public libraries evolved from a rare commodity into a core service. Now, people from all walks of life rely on this service every day to look for jobs, find health care, and read the latest news. As the nation struggled through a historic recession, nearly one-third…

This article discusses game design concepts suggested to foster engagement while considering the needs of underserved high school students preparing for the college admission process. The contextual nature of college counseling efforts in urban secondary school settings provides a backdrop for consideration of the manner in which game design and…

Data on perceptions of 1354 Canadian college and university students with disabilities about how well their information and communication technology (ICT) needs are being met on and off campus were collected. These formed the basis for the POSITIVES Scale (Postsecondary Information Technology Initiative Scale). The measure contains 26 items which…

The primary purpose of the current study was to examine barriers to the use of distance education and explore related factors in small and low-income rural schools. Data were collected via a telephone survey with administrators or other qualified personnel. The sample involved 417 randomly selected small and low-income rural school districts…

The relative ubiquity of computer access and the rapid development of information and communication technology have profoundly impacted teaching and learning at a distance. Relatively little is currently known about the characteristics of those students who participate in distance e-learning courses at the secondary school level. In an effort to…

The Afterschool Alliance and MetLife Foundation are proud to celebrate a fifth round of the MetLife Foundation Afterschool Innovator Awards. For the past five years, we have collaborated to highlight the work of quality afterschool programs that support children, families and communities across the nation. This compendium is a compilation of four…

Citing her own difficulties in gaining access to digital repositories that would have made her research on "New Women" much less time-consuming, the author argues here that the digital divide between the ivory-tower haves and have-nots will be a defining one for the current generation of scholars. The inequity in ease of access, she asserts,…

The technological advance that has dominated various aspects of our daily life has led to the emergence of new literacies. This created a need for reconceptualizing the old notion of literacy which was restricted to the ability of reading and writing. It has been stated forward by many scholars that we now require a richer and more diversified…

While not a brand new phenomenon, online social networking sites continue to be exceedingly popular and seem to be where students spend much of their time. Not only are participants blogging, texting, chatting, sharing files, gaming, and existing virtually online, they also are forming communities and new cultures and exhibiting new informational…

The purposes of the study were to explore the role of Canada's public libraries in developing the public's information literacy (IL) skills, to explore current IL training practices, and to explore the perspectives and IL experiences of individuals who visit public libraries to access the Internet. This article documents the second phase of a…

This paper is concerned with the requirements for and implications of, moving from the confines of the conventional concept of the digital divide to one that reflects a world distribution of Internet users with different income levels, with particular reference to those users living in poverty. The first part of the note provides a simple,…

In this article, the authors discuss a rural middle school teacher's use of YouTube, digital stories, and blogs in a language arts curriculum. The authors also share the voices of middle school students as they learn through this technology in the classroom. Although a wide variety of technology integration exists in this middle school language…