Explaining Performance Gaps Between Native and Immigrant Students in Digital Reading Through Group-Specific Navigation Behavior

• In Event: Roundtable Session 25
  In Roundtable Session: Research on Digital Technologies for Literacy Development

Abstract

Immigrant students lag behind their native peers not only in traditional measures of educational achievement, but also in the 21st century skill of digital reading. Using PISA 2009 data, we show that discrepancies in digital reading between native and both 1st and 2nd generation immigrant students can only to a small extent be explained by social background. Rather, these discrepancies can be explained by group-specific task-engagement behavior. Immigrant students lag behind their native peers in the precision of access to relevant information in digital reading tasks, and in task-adaptive processing of relevant information. When these variables are taken into account, estimated differences in digital reading skill between native and immigrant students are reduced to about 20% of their original size.

Authors

• Johannes Naumann, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University

• Malte Elson, Ruhr University Bochum

• Dominique Patricia Rauch