"Korean Teens Top Tests of Digital Literacy Skills"

Direct to OECD Report News Release

PISA 2009 Results: Students On Line tasked students with evaluating information on the Internet, assessing its credibility and navigating webpages to test their digital reading performance.

Students from 16 OECD countries took part – Australia, Austria, Belgium, Chile, Denmark, France, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Spain and Sweden – as well as three non-member economies – Colombia, Hong Kong – China, and Macao – China.

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“Digital technologies provide a great opportunity to make students more active participants in classroom learning, to tailor learning better to individual students’ needs and to give students access to the worlds current research and thinking,” said Barbara Ischinger, OECD Director of Education.

Girls performed better than boys in every economy, but the difference was less marked than in print reading: girls scored an average of 24 points more, compared to a difference of 39 points in print, the equivalent to one year of schooling. Harnessing boys’ relatively strong digital reading performance may be a way to improve their overall reading ability and engagement, says the report.

The survey highlighted wide gaps between the highest and lowest performing-students in some countries. In Hungary, Austria and Belgium, 141, 137 and 133 points separate the top and bottom quarters of the 15-year old population.

Direct to the Complete Report (Primary Document and Database):
“PISA 2009 Results: Students On Line: Digital Technologies and Performance (Volume VI)”

From Penn-Olson:

15-year old students from sixteen countries have had their digital literacy put to the test, and Korean kids came out on top – displaying that they possess the most adeptness at using the internet productively for school work and research.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) tasked the students with “evaluating information on the Internet, assessing its credibility and navigating webpages to test their digital reading performance.” Those are all key skills in the digital era, where the internet is a source of information that needs to be used as carefully and judiciously as any library. Print reading skills were also gauged, as part of the test’s focus on using learning resources.

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