2. Digital natives
Source: OECD calculations based on OECD PISA 2015 Database, July 2017. StatLink contains more data.
On average, 56% of 15-year-old boys in OECD play online games daily or almost daily against only 13% of girls, who themselves have a higher propensity to chat online.
The Internet permeates every aspect of the economy and society, and is also becoming an essential element of young people’s lives. Increasingly, policy makers require evidence of the impact of ICTs on students’ school performance. However, current research presents a rather mixed picture and underlines the need for additional metrics.
According to the results of the 2015 OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), 17% of students in the OECD area first accessed the Internet at the age of 6 or before. For countries where data are available, less than 0.3% of 15-year-olds reported never having accessed the Internet.
The age of first access to the Internet varies across countries. Over 30% of students started using the Internet at the age of 6 or before in Denmark, Estonia, Iceland and Israel. The most common age of first access to the Internet is between 7 and 9 years in about two-thirds of the countries surveyed by PISA, and 10 years and over in the remaining third.
In 2015, 43% of 15-year-olds in the OECD area spent between 2 and 6 hours a day online outside school – a sizeable increase from less than 30% in 2012. Brazil and Chile were the countries with the largest proportion of students (over 30%) spending more than 6 hours a day on the Internet outside school.
Today, 62% of 15-year-olds in the OECD area chat online and 73% participate in a social network daily or almost daily. Gender differences are particularly notable in activities such as playing online games (most popular among boys) and uploading personally created content for sharing online (most popular among girls).
Definitions
Students assessed by PISA are between the ages of 15 years, 3 months and 16 years, 2 months. They must be enrolled in school and have completed at least six years of formal schooling, regardless of the type of institution, programme followed or whether the education is full-time or part-time.
Online games include one-player or collaborative online games.
All PISA shares are reported as a percentage of respondents. Results are based on students’ self-reports.
Source: OECD calculations based on OECD PISA 2015 Database, July 2017. StatLink contains more data.
Source: OECD calculations based on OECD PISA 2015 Database, July 2017. StatLink contains more data.
PISA 2015 assessed the skills of 15-year-olds in 72 economies. Over half a million students between the ages of 15 years, 3 months and 16 years, 2 months, representing 28 million 15-year-olds globally, took the internationally agreed 2-hour test.
The ICT familiarity questionnaire is an optional module and consists of questions on the availability of ICTs at home and school, the frequency of use of different devices and technologies, students’ ability to carry out computer tasks and their attitudes towards computer use. In 2015, 47 out of 72 economies participating in PISA ran this specific module. Despite the valuable information gained as a result of implementation, the ICT questionnaire was not administered in 2015 in several OECD countries (Canada, Norway, Turkey and the United States) due largely to the high costs generated by the inclusion of these additional questions in the survey.
Increasing availability of data from multiple PISA waves allows the assessment of student use of ICTs both at school and outside school over time, as well as investigation of the impact on school performance, which is a key concern for education policy makers.