Can digital technologies help reduce the immigrant-native educational achievement gap?

It is well established in the literature that students from immigrant backgrounds tend to perform worse in terms of several educational outcomes than their native counterparts, even after controlling for socio-economic factors. Digital technologies may help reduce these gaps by, for instance, facilitating the learning of the language of the host country and allowing access to educational material in native languages. Using the recent Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015 data, the aim of this report is twofold. First, it describes the access to and use of digital technologies among 15-year-old students, comparing immigrant and native students. We show that immigrant students start using digital technologies later in life but, at 15 years old, use it more intensively than native students for almost all the types of use analysed. The perceived information and communication technology (ICT) competence level is, overall, similar for immigrant and native students and, when different, is generally higher for immigrants. Second, the report explores the drivers of the immigrant-native science achievement gap in PISA, paying special attention to ICT-related variables. Our findings indicate that current differences in these variables are associated with the achievement gap and support the idea that ICT-related policies have the potential to decrease the immigrant-native achievement gap. The evidence suggests that, at school, the intensity of ICT use by immigrant students should be lessened. In contrast, outside school, immigrant students would benefit from more intense use of ICT for schoolwork and general purposes. Despite these overall conclusions, our analysis also unveils the need for country- and context-specific policies. The extensive analysis presented in this report with regard to countries and immigrant generations should therefore be taken into account to guide policy actions.