Educational ICT use outside school in the European Union: disparities by social origin, immigrant background, and gender

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes inequalities in using information and communication technologies (ICTs) for educational activities outside school by social origin, immigrant background, and gender. It examines whether these inequalities just work additively or whether certain combinations of these groups are associated with specific advantages or disadvantages and which factors drive these differences. Data from the EU sample of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 are used for the empirical analyses. The results show that male students with immigrant background and highly educated parents have the highest frequency of educational ICT use, while native female students with less educated parents show the lowest frequency. However, the group categories also interact: An academic family background is more advantageous for students with immigrant background and for boys than for native students and girls. The male advantage can be attributed to a general higher frequency of boys using ICTs in their free time, while the advantage of an academic family background is mainly due to a better endowment with educational resources at home. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

IMPACT SUMMARY

a. Prior State of Knowledge:

Inequalities in students’ (offline) educational activities according to their social origin, immigrant background, and gender are well known. Differences in students’ ICT usage have been documented as well. However, the two literatures have hardly been combined so far.

b. Novel Contributions:

The paper examines whether inequalities in adolescents’ ICT use for educational purposes outside school exist according to social origin, immigrant background, and gender. It also analyzes how far these inequalities interact and which factors drive these inequalities.

c. Practical Implications:

As some social groups were shown to be less familiar with educational ICT use at home, all students should be supported in acquiring familiarity in using ICTs for educational purposes, e.g., by strengthening the inclusion of ICTs at school.

KEYWORDS:

• Use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)
• educational ICT use
• digital divide
• educational inequality
• intersectionality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The following countries are included: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom. Students without Internet access at home or who never used the Internet (1.8%), as well as students with missing values on the dependent variable (17.9%), were excluded. Multiple imputation with chained equations was used to impute missing values on independent variables.

2. Using an alternative definition (immigrant background = student is foreign-born or has two foreign-born parents), the share of students with immigrant background is much smaller (only 12% of the sample).

3. All OLS regression models include country-fixed effects in order to control for country-level heterogeneity (Möhring, 2012). All analyses consider the clustering of students in schools and use the nonresponse adjusted student weight that is provided in the data (OECD, in press, chapter 8).

4. The khb method is used for this analysis which is a method for comparing the estimated coefficients of two nested nonlinear probability models but can also very conveniently be used for linear models (Karlson, Holm, & Breen, 2012; Kohler, Karlson, & Holm, 2011).

5. A more detailed analysis (not reported) shows that the immigrant advantage is driven by first-generation immigrant students and students with two foreign-born parents, while students with only one foreign-born parent do not differ from natives. However, the group of students with one native-born parent and one foreign-born parent is itself a very heterogeneous category since it combines the offspring of intermarriages and students with one first-generation parent and one second-generation parent (see Becker, 2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Birgit Becker

Dr. Birgit Becker is a Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research interests include education and educational inequality, socialization and early childhood, integration of immigrants, and digital inequality. Her work has been published in journals such as American Educational Research Journal, European Sociological Review, and Child Indicators Research.