ICT Self-Efficacy and ICT Interest Mediate the Gender Differences in Digital Reading: A Multilevel Serial Mediation Analysis

Hangyan Yu,Jie Hu

doi:10.3991/ijet.v17i05.25691

Abstract

With an increasing number of information has disseminated in the digital form, digital reading, a sub-construct of ICT literacy, is significant for young generations to succeed in the digital era. gender differences, however is ob-served in students’ digital reading performance which calls for meticulous ex-amination. This study aimed to explore whether ICT self-efficacy and ICT in-terest could explain the gender differences in digital reading, and how ICT self-efficacy and ICT interest are associated in explaining the gender differ-ences in digital reading. Data from 6,173 samples from 192 schools in Estonia who took part in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 were collected. Multilevel serial mediation analysis showed that both ICT self-efficacy and ICT interest mediated the gender differences in digital reading, the lower level of ICT self-efficacy and ICT interest girls had could explain the decrease of their digital reading performance. Results also indicat-ed that girls were not inherently less interested in ICT, and the seemingly less ICT interest girls had was largely owing to their lower level of ICT self-efficacy shaped by the general sex-role stereotype of computer use. Pedagogi-cal intervention on strengthening girls’ ICT self-efficacy was suggested to in-crease girls ICT interest and their digital reading performance to empower them in the digital era.

Highlights

Information and communications technology (ICT) has revolutionized our mode of assessing information from print reading to digital reading [1-3]
Existing studies have explored the respective impact of ICT self-efficacy and ICT interest as the predictors of ICT achievement, instead of their interrelationships [12], and even fewer research investigated their interaction in explaining the gender gap in digital reading
Results of the total effect of X on Y (c) showed a negative association between gender and students’ digital reading performance (β = -0.2360, CI = [-0.2950, -0.1770], p = 0.0000, SE = 0.0302), indicating boys scored lower than girls by 0.2360 unit, which is consistent with a bulk of previous studies [4-5]

Summary

Introduction

Information and communications technology (ICT) has revolutionized our mode of assessing information from print reading to digital reading [1-3]. With an increasing emphasis on digital reading, researchers found non-negligible gender differences in digital reading performance. Researchers found that boys’ relative better performance in digital reading could be explained by the extra time spent on computer gameplaying among boys which assumed to promote certain digital reading skills such as visual-spatial and image-reading skills [8]. Girls have better command of metacognitive strategies in print reading than boys, this gender gap in digital reading was shown to be smaller between girls and boys, and even nearly negligible [10]. Existing studies have explored the respective impact of ICT self-efficacy and ICT interest as the predictors of ICT achievement, instead of their interrelationships [12], and even fewer research investigated their interaction in explaining the gender gap in digital reading. This study, aimed to unveil the interrelation of ICT self-efficacy and ICT interest to explain the gender gap in digital reading, and insightful understanding on the mechanism of this construct could be achieved

Objectives

Results

Conclusion