Evaluating the causal effects of digital use quality on students’ ICT literacy

With the increasing use of digital resources as supplemental tools in education, the U.S. Department of Education highlights that the current application of digital technologies does not adequately develop students’ lifelong learning skills, such as information and communication technology (ICT) literacy, which are essential in the twenty first century. Prior research on the relationship between digital use and ICT literacy has yielded inconsistent findings, likely due to insufficient consideration of active versus passive use patterns and varying use intensities. Additionally, the predominant focus on correlational analyses rather than causal inference has limited the understanding of how digital use quality influences ICT literacy. This study addresses these gaps by focusing on the information subdomain of ICT literacy (i-ICT) under Ferrari’s DIGCOMP framework. Using confirmatory factor analysis and the two-level model with propensity score analysis method, we investigated the causal relationship of digital use patterns and intensities with i-ICT literacy by analyzing the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2022 15-year-old students in the U.S. The results show that active digital use for school-related activities during study hours does not impact student i-ICT literacy while using for leisure activities during weekdays or weekends negatively affects i-ICT literacy. Additionally, our findings demonstrate that passive digital use can, in some cases, positively affect student i-ICT literacy. These findings help explain prior inconsistencies and offer insights into how the patterns, intensity, timing, and purpose of digital use influence the development of ICT literacy.