Sonia Livingstone
LSE
Leslie Haddon
LSE
What factors shape children’s and young people’s digital skills? And do their digital skills impact the rest of their lives? These are some of the questions we asked in a new systematic evidence review, part of the ySKILLS project funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme. This review provides a first overview of the entire field of young people’s digital skills, revealing the main findings and key evidence gaps.
The International Telecommunication Union defines digital skills as:
“The ability to use ICTs in ways that help individuals to achieve beneficial, high-quality outcomes in everyday life for themselves and others… [and to] reduce potential harm associated with more negative aspects of digital engagement.”
Does the evidence support this? When we came to examine the available evidence, we found lots of different ways of defining and measuring digital skills. This didn’t make our task easier, but after sorting through thousands of studies and reading the best 110 publications in detail, here’s some of our conclusions.
What factors influence children’s digital skills?
- Age matters: older children report higher levels of skills than the younger ones.
- Gender doesn’t matter so much – although boys often report better digital skills than girls, studies which actually test children’s skills find no gender differences.
- Parental practices of restrictive mediation are linked to their children having lower digital skills, while enabling mediation tends to be linked to better digital skills.
- Children who get earlier and/or better access to ICTS at home or school also tend to have better digital skills, though we could wish more researchers control for socio-economic status, as it may be this explains both ICT access and children’s digital skills.
- It is intriguing that certain online activities accorded little value by society (e.g. gaming, communication) are linked to better digital skills, while digital learning activities are not consistently linked to digital skills. Clearly the process by which children and young people gain better skills needs more exploration.
Given the huge hopes placed in the benefits that digital skills will bring, and the huge effort to overcome the barriers, we were surprised to find that the impact of digital skills on children’s and young people’s everyday lives has been insufficiently researched.
We found only indicative evidence that digital skills really help children and young people aged 12-17 years old to maximise their online opportunities and minimise the risks. Still it does appear that, in terms of the consequences of digital skills:
- Children with better digital skills also enjoy better learning outcomes, which is important for the educators and policy makers who advocate for digital literacy as the fourth ‘R’ in the classroom.
- There are only a few studies that found evidence of how teachers and the school environment influenced digital skills, which was surprising given the aspirations of educators.
- Although available studies suggest that better skills bring benefits to children’s participation, wellbeing and other outcomes, more research is needed to conclude with confidence, and to explore the factors that matter.
- Some findings are complex. For instance, while better digital skills are associated – perhaps counter-intuitively – with more exposure to risky and potentially harmful online content, the evidence also suggests that these children are more able to cope with online risks.
- Also, while digital skills often seemed to have a bearing on other learning outcomes, it depends on which skill is at stake, and what is being learned.
- Moreover, while some digital skills influence offline activities, it is necessary to focus on which digital skills have this effect rather than looking at digital skills in general.
We have just highlighted the main findings here. The diagram summarises all the factors – antecedents and consequences of digital skills – examined in the full report. This took a lot of work by us and our colleagues, Davide Cino, Mary-Alice Doyle, Giovanna Mascheroni and Mariya Stoilova, and we encourage you dive in and pursue questions that especially interest you.
Of course, researchers always think more research is needed. But it is! Most of the available studies were conducted in the global North, most report correlations though there are some interesting studies that model causal relations, although they are still cross-sectional not longitudinal, in the main. And most ask their participants to report on their own digital skills rather than testing these directly, to avoid social desirability biases. We are confident that the research on digital skills will become deeper and richer. After all, this is a very new field – the graph below shows how many studies on youth digital skills we found in the Web of Science. Most were published in the last decade, even in the last five years!
So, what does all this mean? We’ll end by highlighting two key conclusions:
First, young people’s digital skills are unequally distributed, yet they have consequences. Attention to digital inclusion is therefore crucial – and it is not just a matter of having access to ICT but, also, to having the skills to use it, and to ensure this use results in tangible beneficial outcomes.
Second, the media panics around children’s internet risks favours a narrow conceptualisation of children’s digital skills as the ability to use the internet safely and responsibly. But, usefully, the research literature contains many promising ideas pointing to a broader and more ambitious conception of beneficial outcomes for young citizens in a digital world.
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