Poster #39 - Digital Literacy and Gender: Similar Actual Performance but Underestimation of Literacies by Female Middle School Students

• In Event: 51.082 - MTCC Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: 51.082-9 - The Learning Appeal

Abstract

This study investigates gender differences of middle school students in digital literacy (DL) competencies and self-evaluations of these literacies in digital tasks based on the DL framework (Eshet-Alkalai, 2012). A battery of DL performance tasks (Porat et al., 2018) and a DL questionnaire (Blau & Shamir-Inbal, 2014) were administrated among 280 seventh-graders and 237 eight-graders. In both stratums, very few gender differences were found in actual performance of DL, while self-evaluations were significantly lower among female students. Differences in performance of social-emotional and real-time thinking literacies may reflect gender differences in interests and therefore different usage, while persistent lower self-evaluations of female adolescents can be attributed to inequality in technology-related social expectations, and call for educational interventions.

Authors

• Ina Blau, The Open University of Israel

• Erez Porat

• Azy Barak, University of Haifa