Abstract:

Due to the increasing migration to Europe, all European countries share a common educational goal: to provide equal educational opportunities to all children no matter their background (ET 2020, 2009). European schools provide a range of supporting measures for immigrant children (see Eurydice, 2004). Still, educational research has been stressing worse schools results of immigrant children in comparison to their native peers. One of the consequences is that immigrant children leave the educational system prematurely (Hermansen, 2016). This kind of failure has been explained usually because of the deficit of social and cultural capital, caused by a tendency to exclusion (Zhou & Bankston, 1994, etc.).

An important part of the social and cultural capital of today's immigrant children and families is the ownership and access to modern information and communication technologies (ICT). ICT can even be looked at in terms of its capacity to offset cultural differences. However, we still have only a fractal knowledge about the way, how immigrant children have been actually using ICT (Tondeur et al, 2011). Therefore, we have decided to examine this area by utilizing secondary quantitative analysis of data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015. The main aim of this paper is then to examine whether there are differences in the use of ICT between native and immigrant 15-year-old children.

In order to fulfil the goal of the paper, multilevel modelling was used (Snijders & Bosker, 2012). During analysis, we have worked with data from 10 European countries that used the ICT Familiarity Questionnaire (OECD, 2017) and had more than 10% of immigrant children (1st and 2nd generation) in their samples. As for the variables used, we distinguish between student use of ICT in school and outside of school and between the use of ICT outside of school for schoolwork and for leisure activities. The preliminary results suggest that there indeed are some differences in the use of ICT between native and immigrant children but an important factor is a context in which ICT is used. While immigrant children use ICT at home for school purposes significantly more than their native peers in investigated countries, there don't seem to be significant differences in the use of ICT outside of school for leisure activities.

References:
[1] ET 2020 (2009). The Strategic Framework for European Cooperation in Education and Training. Brussel: European Council.
[2] Eurydice (2004). Integrating immigrant children into schools in Europe. Brusel: Eurydice.
[3] Hermansen, A. S. (2016). Moving up or falling behind? Intergenerational socieconomic progress among children of Norwegian immigrants. European Sociological Review, 32(5), 675–689.
[4] OECD. (2017). PISA 2015 Technical report. Paris, OECD Publishing.
[5] Snijders, T. A. B., & Bosker, R. J. (2012). Multilevel analysis: An introduction to basic and advanced multilevel modeling. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
[6] Tondeur, J, et al. (2011). ICT as cultural capital: The relationship between socioeconomic status and the computer-use profile of young people. New Media & Society, 13(1), 151–168.
[7] Zhou, M., Bankston, C. L. (1994). Social capital and the adaptation of the second generation: The case of Vietnamese youth in New Orleans. International Migration Review, 28(4), 821–845.

Keywords:

Use of ICT, immigrant children, PISA 2015, social and cultural capital, socio-economic status.