The iDCA tests are made up of three sections: technological, cognitive and ethical.
In the technological section the questions concerning a formal knowledge of the technology, like computer structure, hardware and software have been neglected. On the contrary, the items in the test have been focused on the understanding of common situations, like the ones people can meet in everyday life and/or working directly at the computer, and presuppose concrete problem solving skills.
The cognitive section can be identified with the Information Literacy (i.e., an ability in processing, managing and reading, together with the critical evaluation of texts, data, information and sources). The items in this section need general cognitive skills from the students (i.e., mostly linguistic or logic-linguistic competences), to be solved: there could be high correlation between the results from this test and more specific tests on the same topics.
The ethic section concerns more or less suitable behaviors needed in the use of technologies and more generally on the Internet; these behaviors are at the centre of today’s scientific debate due to the differences between the growing technological skills of the net generation and the scarse attention the same generation has for the ethical and social consequences of technological behaviors. The section is made up of three sub-sections aimed at: protecting, respecting and knowing (the technological gap).

Submitted for publication in a chapter of the book “Issues on Information and Media Literacy” edited by M. Learning