How Does Digital Capital Foster Students' Creativity? Evidence from the Survey on Social and Emotional Skills 2023

• In Event: Roundtable Session 9
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Empowering Youth Through Digital Capital, Extracurriculars, and Skills Development

Proposal

Background: Understanding and enhancing students' creativity is crucial for equipping them with the innovative skills needed to navigate and excel in an increasingly complex and dynamic world. This research addresses the profound impacts of technological advancements on education, exploring how digital tools and resources can shape and foster creative development in learners amidst the broader challenges and opportunities posed by a hyper-connected world.

Framework: This study employs Massimo Ragnedda's (2018) digital capital framework (digital ability and digital resources) to measure digital capital and uses creativity indicators from the Survey on Social and Emotional Skills (SSES 2023) to analyze creativity, providing insights into the interplay between technological resources and creative outcomes.

Data Source and Analysis: The study focuses on Chinese students participating in the second round of the OECD’s SSES survey. The final sample consists of 7,648 students from China, including 3,949 students aged 10 and 3,699 students aged 15, with 3,948 male students and 3,700 female students. OLS regression is used to assess how digital capital influences students’ creativity, controlling for gender, age, socioeconomic status, and grade. Shapley value decomposition quantifies the contribution of each feature to the model’s predictions. Quantile regression examines how the impact of digital capital on creativity varies across different levels of creative development.

Results: The results show that digital resources such as desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and e-readers positively impact students' creativity, with average increases in creativity scores of 4.75, 3.43, 4.81, and 7.78 points per unit increase in these variables, respectively. In terms of digital skills, students with the ability to search for career information online score an average of 28.96 points higher in creativity than those without this skill, while those who can search for high school and college program information online score 20.46 points higher. Shapley's value decomposition reveals that digital skills contribute more to changes in creativity than digital resources, with a cumulative contribution rate of 28%, particularly for the ability to search for career information (18.55%). Quantile regression analysis shows that, for digital resources, the impact of tablets and e-readers on creativity demonstrates increasing marginal effects, with continued improvements in creativity as their numbers increase. In contrast, the impact of TVs and desktops fluctuates with quantiles, especially reducing creativity for high-level creative students. Mobile phone ownership shows decreasing marginal effects on creativity, with high-level creative students experiencing more significant declines with increased phone numbers. Regarding digital skills, the ability to search for career and school information online enhances creativity, with a growing impact on students with higher levels of creativity.

Contributions: This insight is crucial because it emphasizes the role of practical digital skills in fostering creativity, suggesting that educational strategies should focus not only on providing access to digital tools but also on enhancing students' ability to use these tools effectively for creative problem-solving and exploration. This can guide educators and policymakers in designing more targeted interventions to improve creativity in students through both digital resources and skill-building activities.

Authors

• Hong Zhang, East China Normal University

• Jiayuze Zhang

• yuanyuan Li, East China Normal University

• Mengnan Zhang