The Availability and Use of Digital Technologies in Relation to Students’ School Performance

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This chapter focuses on how much the availability of digital technologies and their use by present-day Czech adolescents affect student performance in school. Even though digital technologies are a key topic both in current pedagogical research and within regular school practice, there are still many ambiguities about the actual impact of digital technologies and their use on the results of the education of today’s students. The goal of this chapter is to describe and explain how the availability and use of digital technologies by students both in and outside of school are reflected in their school performance. Within the analyses, we focus on the availability and the use of digital technologies directly in school and on the availability and the use of digital technologies by students in their home environments. In addition to the use of digital technologies in general, we focus specifically on the frequency of Internet use and we consider other aspects related to the use and the role of digital technologies in adolescents’ lives, such as interest in digital technologies and the perceived ability and independence in their use.In the first part of the chapter, we introduce the topic of the availability and use of digital technologies as a whole and then specify a concrete research question that we ask in this part of the research. We describe the methodology of the performed analyses, including a basic description of the variables used. In the next three subchapters, we gradually present the answers to our three research questions. In the final part, we conclude by summarizing and discussing the results of the performed analyses, and we set them in a wider context.KeywordsDigital technologiesSchoolsHomeStudentsCompetenceAutonomySchool performancePISA