IEA INSIDER 2025
ICILS: From Insight to Innovation
BY JULIAN FRAILLON
“It was only possible to collect the rich data in ICILS 2023 due to the participation of more than 130,000 students and 60,000 teachers, ICT-coordinators, and principals from more than 5,000 schools.”
The end of 2024 was marked by the release of the ICILS 2023 international report. This was a culmination of more than 5 years’ work in the ICILS international study center at IEA, and in national centers across the 35 participating education systems. It was only possible to collect the rich data in ICILS 2023 due to the participation of more than 130,000 students and 60,000 teachers, ICT-coordinators, and principals from more than 5,000 schools. In early 2025 we released the ICILS 2023 international database—a veritable treasure trove of information that researchers and policymakers alike may use to investigate student digital literacy achievement and, more importantly, how it is being developed and what may be done to improve students’ digital literacy education. The ICILS 2023 International Report: An International Perspective on Digital Literacy presented strong concerns about students’ digital literacy achievement, in an age where their use of digital technologies continues to increase. These concerns are evident both in students’ demonstrable achievement in ICILS 2023, and with respect to the lack of improvement in grade 8 students’ digital literacy over the 10 years since the first cycle of ICILS in 2013. The report revealed that students’ computer and information literacy was lower in 2023 than in 2013. ICILS 2023 was developed,
in part, to provide data to help answer a series of research questions relating to student digital literacy achievement and the contexts in which it develops. However, the overarching question that has emerged from analyses of the ICILS 2023 student data is: Why is student digital literacy decreasing in an increasingly digital world? There are no simple answers to this question, there is no silver bullet. However, ICILS offers an opportunity for us to better understand digital literacy learning. To this end, we have planned a series of ICILS Insights reports across the coming years. These reports will focus on different aspects of digital literacy learning, including the role of teachers in fostering digital literacy learning, the role of school leadership in fostering digital literacy education within schools, the factors that appear to have the strongest associations with student digital literacy learning outcomes, and the changing nature of the digital divides that exacerbate differences in learning outcomes with respect to social disadvantage. We are currently laying the foundation for ICILS 2028 and have entered the exciting phase of reflecting on what we are learning from the past and integrating it with what we can foresee for the future. More than any other
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