Information technology, mathematics achievement and educational equity in developed economies

Abstract

The present study examined how access to home and school IT resources impacted student mathematics achievement. Data comprised 144,395 secondary school students from 7,308 schools in 22 developed economies who participated in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012. Results of hierarchical linear modelling showed that after controlling for student and school covariates, student achievement benefited from their access to home IT resources (main effect), and from the access to both home IT resources and highly educated mothers (interactive effect). Furthermore, IT resource shortages in school had a detrimental impact on student achievement (main effect), and the shortage accentuated the negative effects of school shortage in qualified teachers on achievement (interactive effect). Lastly, the results showed that students with less home academic and cultural resources were more impacted by IT resource access when compared to peers from advantaged families.

Keywords:

• Information technology
• school
• home
• mathematics achievement
• equity

Notes

1. In HLM models with randomly varying slopes examined, the slope variance for Home IT (7.00, Wald Z = 1.09, one-tailed p = .14) and ShortIT (67.24, Wald Z = 0.96, one-tailed p = .17) were not significant. These results indicated that the effects of Home IT and ShortIT did not vary systematically across different schools, and therefore supported the examination of the achievement of the entire sample of students using fixed effect models. The collective analysis of data from different economies, as opposed to analysis of schools in individual economies, also addressed the potential problem of range restriction (Schleicher 2009).

2. The negative reduction in variance explained could be due to the more restricted range in predictor variables for students with high familial cultural capital (Heck, Thomas, and Tabata 2010).