Spanish students do reasonably well in the International Study on Digital Competence (for its acronym in English) published this Tuesday, in which 34 countries have participated, the vast majority of them developed. Spain obtains 495 points, slightly above the average of the 22 States of the European Union that have participated (493). The Spanish result does not present a statistically significant difference compared to that of Germany (502), France (498) or Italy (491). The ICILS is prepared every five years by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), one of the main international educational entities. In this latest edition, 130,000 students (13,000 of them Spanish) and 60,000 teachers (6,240 of them Spanish) participated. The report measures “the ability of students to collect, manage, produce and exchange information through the use of computers” as a way to “effectively participate: home, school, workplace and, in general, the community that surrounds them. surrounds.”
Nine autonomous communities have participated in the test through an expansion of the sample. The one with the best result, 518 points, is Catalonia, which, if it were a country, would be in third position in the general classification, tied with Denmark. Next are the Community of Madrid (514), Asturias (512), Castilla y León (507), La Rioja (505), the Canary Islands (502), Cantabria (500), Andalusia (477) and the Valencian Community (472). The autonomous city of Melilla achieves 432 points, and that of Ceuta, 421.
The , like the rest of academic skills, is highly conditioned by the socioeconomic and cultural background of the kids. In Spain, the 25% of students belonging to the richest households obtain 69 points more than the 25% who live in the poorest households (the average difference in the EU is 79 points).
Girls present better performance in all the countries evaluated: Spanish girls achieve 19 points more than their peers (in the European Union as a whole, the advantage of female students is 18 points). In other major educational tests, organized by the OECD, female students tend to obtain better results in reading, while boys and, less clearly, in science. That is why it is relevant to observe that in the case of digital skills, it is women who obtain a clear advantage, which is statistically significant in all countries except two, Hungary and Uruguay.
Kids of immigrant origin (the IEA considers as such those whose two parents were born outside the country where the student studies) obtain worse results both in Spain (28 points less) and in the EU as a whole (29 less). There are seven countries where immigrants perform better than natives, although in only three the difference is statistically significant; Bosnia-Herzegovina (38 more points), Azerbaijan (52), and Oman (64).
Spain is located, in the general classification, in the middle of the table. Well above the last places, occupied by Azerbaijan (319 points), Kosovo (356) and Oman (379). And far from those at the top, where South Korea (540) and the Czech Republic (525) are. Unlike other international assessments, such as PISA, in the ICILS there are very few Asian participants, only two, who are, however, among the best. (first place), there is Taiwan, fourth, with 515 points. Denmark is third with 518.
First edition in which Spain participates
ICILS began to be carried out a decade ago. This is the third edition and the first in which Spain participates. Of the 34 countries evaluated, 22 are part of the European Union. The IEA has a dual headquarters, in Germany and the Netherlands, and is made up of official educational organizations, universities and research centers from 60 countries. Its best-known reports are TIMSS (which evaluates mathematical competence in primary and ESO students) and PIRLS (reading comprehension in primary school students).
Spain stands out, as it usually does in these tests, by having a relatively low dispersion of results – that is, a gap between student performance. This means that it does not have many students with excellent results, but not many with very bad results either. The majority tends to be in average results, in line with what happens in the European Union as a whole.
ICILS divides students into five levels. Less than 1, 1, 2, 3 and 4. In Spain, 44.4% do not reach level 2, practically the same as the EU average (44.1%). Students who reach level 2 use computers, according to the agency’s bureaucratic description, “to complete basic and explicit information gathering and management tasks; they locate explicit information in certain digital sources; perform basic edits and add content to existing information products in response to specific instructions; They create simple information products that reflect standard design and layout conventions, and show understanding of personal data protection strategies and recognize the implications of making your personal information publicly accessible.”
At level 4, which very few students reach except in countries like Korea (where they represent 6.4%) and Taiwan (2.8%), kids “know how to select the most relevant information to use for communicative purposes as well as satisfy their needs as consumers and producers of information; They assess the usefulness of information and evaluate its credibility and reliability based on its content and probable origin, and create information products taking into account audience and communicative purpose,” among other skills.
Means at your fingertips
Having more digital media is associated, as one would expect, with more competent students in the subject. Spain has a relatively high percentage of students with “quality Internet connection”: 63.2%, ahead of the community average (62%), and countries such as Germany (62.1%) or France (60.4%). %). Internally, there is a notable difference between La Rioja (67.5%) and the Valencian Community (60.5%).
Spain is, however, “significantly below the EU average” in the proportion of students who live in homes with at least two computers: 68%, compared to 73.7% in the European Union as a whole ( or 91.6% of Denmark, which is where there are the most). The percentage in Catalonia (80.9%) is much higher than that of the Canary Islands (54.9%). The difference in digital performance between kids from homes with at least two computers at home and those with fewer, reaches 32 points in Spain (39 in the EU).
Spain also appears to be lagging behind in students with “access to a computer to do schoolwork”: 56.7% compared to 64.4% in the Union. At the regional level, the distance between Catalonia (66.2%) and the Valencian Community (48.8%) is large.
Family boundaries and distractions
A third of Spanish students use ICT daily to carry out school tasks in educational centers (in the EU, slightly less, 31.8%). And the country is among those with the most time limitations for kids when it comes to using screens by their families. The study presents the data in a negative way: 41.5% claim to have no time limit on school days, compared to an EU average of 59.4%. In Spain, kids are slightly below the European average in digital distractions, such as chatting or checking social networks, while studying: 49.9% compared to 50.6%.
Only 49.1% of Spanish students learn in educational centers to search appropriately on the web (refining searches, evaluating the reliability of information, and citing precise references from the sources consulted), a percentage similar to the average of the EU (49.7%). And only 50.1% of students in Spain learn to use ICT safely and respectfully at school (with parameters such as the dissemination of images and personal information; reporting mechanisms for cyberbullying, and attention to psychological risks) , a somewhat higher proportion than the community (49.3%).
Spanish students learn in educational centers somewhat less than the EU average how to organize digital files (64.5% compared to 65.7%), manage spreadsheets (53.6% to 57.3% ), and the more specialized task of programming, both with visual editors (40.8% to 42.5%) and text-based languages (27.4% to 33.2%). And they receive, on the other hand, more training than in the EU as a whole in editing and formatting documents (74.5% compared to 73%) and in editing multimedia files (52.3% to 50.4%).
