21st-Century Readers: Developing Literacy Skills in a Digital World

21st-Century Readers: Developing Literacy Skills in a Digital World

Brief Introduction: The latest PISA report, 21st Century Readers: Developing literacy skills in a digital world, takes a different and equally important perspective, which is to focus on the skills angle. It looks at ways to strengthen students’ capacity to navigate the new world of information. It studies the ways in which students access digital technology, how skilled they are with complex digital reading tasks – and how this varies by geography, social background or gender. It also explores what teachers do to help students navigate ambiguity and manage complexity. The good news is education can make a difference. The report shows that education systems in which more students are taught digital skills have a higher percentage of students who can correctly distinguish facts from opinions in the PISA tasks. On average across OECD countries, 54% of students said they were trained at school to recognise whether information is biased or not. This proportion varies across countries. It is also interesting that the relationship between students’ access to training on how to detect biased information and their capacity to actually distinguish fact from opinion plays out quite differently across countries. There seems to be room for countries and schools to learn from each other how to implement such training programmes most successfully.

Please cite this publication as:

OECD (2021), 21st-Century Readers: Developing Literacy Skills in a Digital World, PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris,https://doi.org/10.1787/a83d84cb-en.

21st-Century Readers Developing Literacy Skills in a Digital World.pdf