Young people hardly have any digital skills

In Austria, for example, more than a third of students in grade 8 (4th grade of high school or AHS) lack even the bare basics of using computers and the Internet, according to a study published Tuesday by the International Association of Educational Achievement ( IEA). ).

Only limited computer skills
On average, across all 35 countries and education regions that participated in the International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS 2023), half of young people achieved a maximum competency level of 1 or lower in computer and information-related skills. These students can solve absolutely routine tasks on the computer only under direct supervision and have major difficulties in assessing the reliability of digital sources.

In European countries 43 percent were at this level, in Austria slightly less at 39 percent. However, in this country we are still far from achieving the EU target that a maximum of 15 percent of 14-year-olds must perform below competency level 2 by 2030.

By comparison: Austria is partly better, partly worse
Competency level 2 and therefore basic knowledge and skills were achieved by 44 percent of the Austrian test participants. 17 percent of Austrian young people ended up at competency level 3, which requires you to have a certain degree of independence in solving problems. Only 1 percent achieved the highest competency level 4. With 506 points in this test area, Austria overall performed significantly better than the average of the comparison countries and also the European countries, IEA director Dirk Hastedt explained in an interview with the APA.

However, in the test area ‘Computational Thinking’ – which is about understanding how computers work – Austria scores slightly below the national average (476 versus 483 points). As on average in all countries, two-thirds in Austria ended up at least at competency level 2.

Those who do not speak German perform worse
However, the performance differences depending on the socio-economic background of the students are much larger than between countries, Hastedt emphasizes. This is again particularly clear in Austria: when it comes to computer and information-related skills, students who do not speak German at home scored 38 points less and students with a migration background 28 points less. Students whose parents have low educational qualifications were 33 points behind. In the Computational Thinking test area, the gap is even greater (58, 44 and 49 points respectively). There are also differences by gender: while girls scored 15 points higher than boys in computer and information-related skills, they were 12 points behind in computational thinking.

These differences by origin are known from all international education comparisons, says Hastedt, whose IEA also conducts the comparison studies for primary education PIRLS (reading) and TIMSS (mathematics, natural sciences). What makes the difference in computer skills “perhaps even more striking” is that the young people in the ICILS study learned almost everything from searching for information on the Internet to handling privacy settings, especially outside of school. “The differences between those who learn it at home or from their friends or not are therefore significantly greater.”

Digital skills belong in the curriculum
Digital skills must therefore be more firmly anchored in the curricula, Hastedt demanded. We need to say goodbye to the ‘myth’ of boys as so-called ‘digital natives’. The fact that young people use their mobile phones intensively every day does not mean that they acquire the digital skills necessary for the 21st century. Compared to the 2013 ICILS survey (in which Austria did not participate, note) skills actually decreased.

Skills such as Powerpoint presentations or internet research are often expected of students without first teaching them how to use them properly. Another lever for improvement for Hastedt would be the training and further training of teaching staff, who must be able to teach these subjects very well. Another problem in many countries is that digital skills are included in the curricula, but are not explicitly tested. But this is important so that students actually learn this content, Hastedt emphasized.

Boundaries are rarely set
In general, young people use information and communication technology on school days, especially for non-school matters. According to the study, which involved more than 130,000 young people and more than 60,000 teachers in 35 education systems, it is relatively rare for parents to set a limit: in Austria, 68 percent of 14-year-olds said they had no limit on the use of digital media. During the school-free period this is 81 percent.