Reflections on the IEA International Computer and Information Literacy Study 2018

Abstract

IEA’s International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS) has contributed to understanding the extent to which young people are able to use information and communication technology (ICT) productively for a range of purposes. Those purposes relate to what happens in school and in other environments such as home, society, and future workplaces. This chapter reflects on the contributions of ICILS through the provision of evidence-based descriptions of achievement progressions for each of computer and information literacy (CIL) and computational thinking (CT), and provides an overview of the main themes emerging from the analyses of the data collected by ICILS 2018. These include: a further challenge to the assertion that young people are “digital natives” and discussion the educational consequences accepting or rejecting this assertion, the relationship between CIL and CT including differences in their relationships with gender, evidence of the digital divide in ICILS data, and the ongoing prevalent uses of digital devices as “digital textbooks” in classrooms. The chapter further discusses the need for teachers to be supported to make the most effective use of digital technologies in the classroom and what ICILS data suggest about the conditions within schools that support teachers to do so. Each of these themes offers a perspective for reflecting on the existing ICILS 2018 report, a starting point for further secondary analyses of data released in the ICILS 2018 international database (IDB) and guides early planning for the development of ICILS 2023.