NUMBER 12 JANUARY 2021
CONCLUSION
Our results suggest that students from lower socioeconomic status are likely to experience unequal opportunities in the future labor market, as they are less endowed with “premium” skills expected to be in high demand. This may potentially lead to larger social inequality, income and job polarization, lower social mobility, and higher poverty rates. In light of the evidence presented here, we argue that policies should address all the relevant dimensions of the socioeconomic digital divide. While it is important to ensure that all students are endowed with the basic ICT “tools” (e.g., PC/notebook/ tablet, internet connection) as well as with the general information retrieval/communication/interaction abilities, this is not sufficient. The labor market will demand an increasing number of workers with cognitive abilities that allow them to develop imaginative solutions to complex problems, often by using digital technologies (including artificial intelligence). Such cognitive abilities, which are typically represented with the term “computational thinking,” involve a set of “hard core” competences that include logic, mathematics, reading capacity, and critical thinking, besides creativity. The schools of the future—and of the present—need to be able to deliver high quality education on all these dimensions and for all students, irrespective of their socioeconomic background.
Our analysis, which relies on ICILS 2018 data, shows that there are already significantly different levels of ICT skills among 15-year-old students depending on their family background. Moreover, when looking separately at CT and CIL test scores, the socioeconomic gap in CT test scores is consistently larger than the corresponding one in CIL test scores. This has two main implications. First, our results emphasize the importance of gathering evidence onvarious dimensions of ICTcompetences as opposed to only focusing on a general indicator of digital skills. Although even simple and routine jobs require individuals to be able to use ICT at some level, more and more occupations in the future will be based on advanced problem-solving abilities. These competences are expected to be associated with better jobs, higher productivity, and overall better labor market outcomes. As mentioned earlier, higher levels of computer proficiency are associated with higher employment probabilities (relative to individuals with basic ICT skills) (e.g., Atasoy et al. 2013; OECD 2013), and higher wages (also relative to individuals with basic ICT skills) (DiMaggio and Bonikowski 2008; Atasoy et al. 2013). Second, if the advanced digital problem-solving abilities (i.e., CT) were not considered, one would underestimate the extent to which individuals from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds are likely to be penalized in the labor market because of their poor endowment of ICT skills.
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