The first book to systematically discuss the skills and literacies needed to use digital media, particularly the Internet, van Dijk and van Deursen's clear and accessible work distinguishes digital skills, analyzes their roles and prevalence, and offers solutions from individual, educational, sociological, and policy perspectives.

The U.S. Army is exploring the advantages of networked computer systems to enhance battlefield situation awareness and command and control, a program known as digitization. The long-term goal of the present effort is to develop measures of the skills needed to exploit the advantages of digitization. The initial challenge was to identify candidate digital skills, since there was no listing of digital skills available to use as a starting point. This report focuses on the approach used to identify candidate digital skills. First, data from the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) were analyzed to identify long- term, high-profile problems likely to be addressed by the effective use of digital systems. Next, digital procedures that units might employ to address these problems, and the cognitive capabilities soldiers would need to implement these solutions, were described. Through this process, twenty-two candidate skills were identified which could be used to identify measures of skill performance. The findings of this report will be used to help define performance standards and develop after action review aids.

This second volume of papers from the ATC21STM project deals with the development of an assessment and teaching system of 21st century skills. Readers are guided through a detailed description of the methods used in this process. The first volume was published by Springer in 2012 (Griffin, P., McGaw, B. & Care, E., Eds., Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills, Dordrecht: Springer). The major elements of this new volume are the identification and description of two 21st century skills that are amenable to teaching and learning: collaborative problem solving, and learning in digital networks. Features of the skills that need to be mirrored in their assessment are identified so that they can be reflected in assessment tasks. The tasks are formulated so that reporting of student performance can guide implementation in the classroom for use in teaching and learning. How simple tasks can act as platforms for development of 21st century skills is demonstrated, with the concurrent technical infrastructure required for its support. How countries with different languages and cultures participated and contributed to the development process is described. The psychometric qualities of the online tasks developed are reported, in the context of the robustness of the automated scoring processes. Finally, technical and educational issues to be resolved in global projects of this nature are outlined.