Do students’ ICT skills pay off in math performance? Examining the moderating role of countries’ ICT promotive environment

Students’ information and communication technology (ICT) skills have been shown to be a valuable resource for their educational performance, although to varying degrees across countries. Our paper adds to existing knowledge to understand how and why country-specific ICT characteristics make a difference to math performance benefits students glean from their ICT skills, thereby adding to a general understanding of how digital divides at different levels are interrelated. We home in specifically on two features that reflect a country’s ICT promotive environment, respectively national ICT access in education and government promotion of ICT. We specifically elaborate on how these country level features augment the learning and signaling function of student ICT skills. Multilevel linear regression analyses were conducted on a sample (PISA 2018) of 248,720 students across 43 countries, enriched with contextual information from the Networked Readiness Index 2016 and World Bank’s data. Congruent with past research our results indicate that student ICT skills serve as an education resource. This, our study reveals, is indeed dependent on the country’s ICT promotive environment, as students’ ICT skills translate to greater math performance gains in countries with higher levels of ICT access in educational environments.