Abstract
Introduction. Digital literacy refers to the skills required to achieve digital competence, the confident and critical use of information and communication technology for le arning, leisure, communication and future work of young people. Digital competence has a dual nature. First of all, it is the technical ability to operate programs, pages, equipment. Secondly, it is also the ability to use digital media safely. Both perspectives are important in the educational perspective, i.e. media educat ion and socialisation. Materials and Methods. The paper presents the attempts to measure digital literacy in the area of threats resutling from using the new media in the group of upper-secondary school students (fourth educational cycle). The study was carried out using a diagnostic test with 18 questions. The research was conducted in the group of 1693 youths aged 15–21. The research was designed based on traditional methods of testing knowledge and skills. Results. The findings showed that the weakest digital literacy component was the copyright-related knowledge and the strongest area was online shopping and financial operations. All digital literacy components are interrelated. The improvement in one area leads to the development of other digital literacy elements. Despite this correlation, digital literacy is a heterogeneous concept. There are also differences regarding certain digital literacy components, determined by gender – girls obtained higher test results in terms of the soft competencies whereas boys were better with the technical aspects of digital literacy. Based on the cluster analysis, we noticed that 41.41% of the students obtained good and very good results from the competence test. More than half of the students require further education in most of the analysed areas. Discussion and Conclusion. For educational decision-makers, the findings highlight the importance of designing training programs aimed at developing students’ digital literacies, with a special focus on new topics as sexting, piracy and cyberbullying.
Highlights
The rapid development of information and communication technologies (ICT) has had considerable and dramatic impact on contemporary educational practice [1,2,3,4,5]
Due to the vast scope of the possible threats, the commissioning institution – Cities on the Internet Association from Tarnów which conducted the study for the Ministry of National Education – narrowed the scope of the research down to 6 components: The research were diagnostic and the results are supposed to help to evaluate the level of knowledge, skills and attitudes related to online safety
The higher results were obtained by the students: of high schools and technical schools F(3, 1689) = 70.793, p = 0.0000; with the best behaviour grades F(5, 1687) = = 18,576, p = 0.0000; with the average and high standard of living F(2, 1690) = 9.6167, p = .00007; living in bigger cities F(4, 1688) = 3.6887, p = .00537 and evaluating their level of Digital literacy (DL) in the area of using mobile devices F(5, 1687) = 31.351, p = 0.0000 and stationary digital devices F(5, 1687) = = 27.303, p = 0.0000 as high and very high
Summary
The rapid development of information and communication technologies (ICT) has had considerable and dramatic impact on contemporary educational practice [1,2,3,4,5]. Many countries recognized the importance of incorporating ICT in education. Household equipment with ICT, and experience with ICT use at home, at school and further at work, or in leisure are very important prerequisites for a lot of everyday activities and life in today society. Digital literacy (DL) has become essential in many occupations and without DL students can hardly continue to study at the university. Schools play a key role in providing ICT education. To practice and promote students to be digitally literate in new developing topics is an essential responsibility of schools
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
