Unravelling Secondary Students’ Challenges in Digital Literacy: a Gender Perspective

Abstract

The use of the Internet to learn involves complex cognitive activities. Educational researchers claim more attention in studying the nature of students’ challenges when using digital information for learning purposes. Our research investigated in depth the challenges that secondary students face when solving web information-problem tasks. We thoroughly analysed how forty secondary students (18 girls and 22 boys) solved a scholar task using web information. The students’ actions on the computer screen were logged. Findings showed specific difficulties in solving digital tasks due to when (1) typing appropriate search terms, and when (2) selecting reliable and useful results from a “search engine results page”, which hinders the correct finding and understanding of web information needed to solve the digital task. In addition, the participants had a lack of reflection regarding the different actions to solve the digital task. Furthermore, our findings revealed that gender was not associated with differences in digital attainment.

Exploring Turkish Pre-Service Teachers’ Perceptions and Views of Digital Literacy

“…However, results regarding this issue vary in the literature. Although this study finding is in line with some studies in the literature [27], some other studies point out that gender does not matter in this regard, which was also highlighted by the vast majority of participants in the interviews in this study [28][29][30][31], or on the contrary, females out-perform males in the overall digital literacy test score [32,33]. Therefore, gender differences in this study might be due to the existence of measurement bias, which might indicate that an assessment instrument is used to measure digital literacy perceptions for females and males.…”

How Digital Natives Learn and Thrive in the Digital Age: Evidence from an Emerging Economy

“…while others underline that of females [36][37][38]. In a recent study, researchers reveal that gender is not associated with differences in digital attainment [60]. It is likely that there has been a vivid change within the gender gap in the new digital generation.…”

Embedded Information Problem-Solving Instruction to Foster Learning from Digital Sources: Longitudinal Effects on Task Performance

“…Research shows that teenagers have problems when they reach the stage of formulating questions [18], clarifying task requirements, activating prior knowledge and determining what information needs searching [16]. In addition, very few students start searching with a prior reflection on the task at hand and clear outlining of their search [10,19,20].…”

“…This variable was qualitative nominal; a rubric scale was constructed to capture the mean level of explanation of the content ideas presented in the essay. The rubric scale started with the category "no answer", which meant that students had failed to write the essay, followed by two categories related to describing facts: (1) "separate pieces of facts" and (2) "organised facts"; the rubric also established two categories related to explaining: (3) "partial explanation" and (4) "explanation" [19,63].…”