Lezen gamende jongens slechter dan e-mailende meisjes? De relaties tussen digitalisering, leesprestaties en sekse ongelijkheid

This article examines the relationship between gender and reading scores through three mediating variables: joy in reading, ICT-usage for visual purposes and ICT-usage for textual purposes. In this research, data is used from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 and contains data from 6758 15-year old children in Belgium. A multivariate regression analysis showed that joy in reading is a very important predictive factor of reading scores: girls have more joy in reading, causing them to perform better with reading than boys. We also find that boys and girls use ICT for different purposes, causing different reading scores. Boys perform lower on reading scores than girls, because they make more use of ICT for visual purposes than girls. There is no significant relationship found between ICT for textual purposes and the higher scores for girls on reading, but additional analysis of other countries shows that this relationship does exist in Denmark and Germany. These results tell us that in a more digitalized society chances and challenges arise in reading, ICT-usage and the differences between groups and countries benefiting from it.