Abstract:

Are today’s digital natives necessarily capable to use the internet in a safe and responsible way? e-safety is an important component of digital literacy (Hague & Payton, 2010) and it is increasingly more important for formal primary education, especially for schools that adopt the “one student: one device” model for learning, where challenges may be increased, as students use the internet daily and extensively (Zucker & Hug, 2007).

Previous studies have shown that, compared to students of other EU countries, students over 11 years old in Cyprus have not developed self-protection skills sufficiently (Livingstone, Haddon, Görzig & Ólafsson, 2011). Moreover, there is a reported lack of studies focusing on younger age groups (Livingstone & Haddon, 2008), despite the acknowledgment that younger kids have reduced skills for self-protection (Livingstone et al., 2011). Moreover, the vast majority of studies measuring young students’ e-safety skills were largely based on students’ self-reports (Sonck et al., 2011; Ofcom, 2014; Mascheroni & Ólafsson, 2014). To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no empirical studies were found that attempted to objectively measure students’ e-safely skills in one:one learning programs.

The present research was a case-study that focused on a primary school with a “one student: one tablet” program in Cyprus, in which students were engaged in several initiatives for e-safety skills and had frequent internet access both at home and in school.
The research questions of the study were: To what extent did primary school students in a 1:1 learning program develop e-safety skills? How do primary students’ self-reported e-safety skills correlate with their actual e-safety skills?

Participants of the study were all the students of the school who attended grades 4th to 6th (n=35, 18 male and 17 female).Two main data sources were used for this study:
a) a student questionnaire with 23 statements measuring students’ perceptions of their e-safety skills and
b) 23 tasks objectively measuring 5 dimensions of e-safety through 10 scenarios that students had to react to in 1:1 meetings with a researcher. The maximum possible score of both tests was 115.

This paper focuses on preliminary results from the analysis and comparison of composite scores between students’ a) self-reported (M=103.14/115 SD=13.17) and b) objectively measured e-safety skills (M=69.07/115, SD=20.62). The Spearman’s rho revealed a statistically significant relationship between students’ perceptions of their e-safety skills and their actual performance on those skills (rs[35] = .6, p < .01). However, individual correlations between questionnaire items and respective tasks, showed that correlations for 15 out of 23 skills were not statistically significant (p>0.05). This indicates a discrepancy between what students report that they know and what they actually know.

Preliminary findings suggest that primary school students in a 1:1 learning program developed e-safety skills at a satisfactory extent (M=69.07/115, SD=20.62, N=35). However, their score on their self-reported e-safety skills is much higher (M=103.14/115 SD=13.17). This finding suggests that studies based on student self-reported data may be inaccurate and may over-estimate students’ actual e-safety skills. This study argues in favor of the use of more objective measures for e-safety skills. Future research studies may attempt to validate these measures with a large sample of students.

Keywords:

E-safety evaluation, tablets, ICT in education, primary education.