An emerging digital divide in urban school children’s information literacy: Challenging equity in the Norwegian school system

Abstract

The emergence of information and communication technology (ICT) has been influencing our society, including the educational sector. In this paper we explore students’ information literacy at the completion of lower secondary school in Norway. Our aim is to measure students’ information literacy at the end of Grade 10, and to identify factors explaining the variations observed. Factors relating to the digital divide, e.g., books at home, language spoken at home and academic aspirations are explored in this study. The sample consists of 3,727 students from 50 lower secondary schools located in a Norwegian city with relatively high immigration rate and various ethnicities. Through statistical multilevel analysis our findings indicate that the number of books at home, the language spoken at home and the students’ academic aspirations explain a very large proportion of the variation in information literacy between schools, and a considerable part of the variation between students–within–schools.