Ensuring Digital Literacy Is Core to Equity, Well-Being, and Resilience of Digital Citizens

• In Event: Exploring Digital Citizenship Education: Comparative Perspectives From Five Nations

Abstract

The focus of digital citizenship has revolved around digital competence and social participation in the curriculum, even though the specific content may differ across countries and evolve over time (Author, 2023). In Hong Kong, the digital citizenship related curriculum has a strong focus on digital literacy. Schools are encouraged to implement it through inquiry-oriented learning integrated across the curriculum, even though it can also be taught as separate subjects (The Curriculum Development Council, 2017). The study reported here investigated the impact of digital media on the everyday life of children and youth, and on their development as citizens in an increasingly technology-intensive and globally-connected world. The project was designed as a longitudinal panel study involving three age cohorts involving three age cohorts: 7-10, 11-14, and 15-18, with main data collection conducted in the first half of 2019 and 2021 respectively. An online performance assessment was developed according to the DigComp 2.1 framework (Carretero et al., 2017) to assess students’ digital literacy.

Findings revealed huge digital literacy divides within and across schools, which further increased between 2019 and 2021. Students’ digital literacy performance was significantly correlated with their online learning self-efficacy, which had huge implications for students’ ability to learn effectively during the pandemic when learning online was the only available means of receiving education due to social distancing. In 2019, about 10% of the students surveyed could only access the Internet at home using their smart phones. Our study found that students who did not have a large screen device (i.e., a tablet, laptop or desktop) at home had lower digital literacy scores, and this difference was larger, for the higher-grade students. Further, the shared use of large screen devices at home was most beneficial to primary students’ digital literacy, indicating that younger students’ digital literacy benefitted much from informal learning at home.

Our longitudinal research also found that digital literacy served as a protective factor for students’ wellbeing. Students with higher levels of digital literacy had lower probabilities of engaging in risky communication, encountering cyberbullying or digital security problems. While longer exposure to digital technology use exposes students to more online risks, higher exposure had significant association with more negative online experiences mainly for students with low digital literacy, Higher digital literacy scores were correlated with lower probability of Internet addiction and game addiction.

Multilevel analysis including school survey data showed that a school’s preparedness for online teaching and learning played an important role in helping students and teachers to navigate through the challenges posed by the pandemic, particularly for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Professional development that engages teachers in school-based innovation projects which integrate the use of online learning technologies were perceived by teachers to be most effective in fostering their online teaching self-efficacy. School-level leadership that put emphasis on building a positive school-wide culture of innovation, collaboration and empowerment was found to be most conducive to building a school’s systemic resilience in advancing the school’s educational vision in the face of adversity. 

Author

• Nancy W.Y. Law, University of Hong Kong