In this chapter, we investigate ICILS survey data with regard to Research Question 4: What aspects of students’ personal and social background (such as gender, socioeconomic background, and language background) are related to computer and information literacy? In order to help answer this question, we reviewed potential associations between CIL achievement and gender as well as between CIL and four types of indicators of students’ home background.
- Educational aspirations (expected highest educational attainment);
- Socioeconomic background (parental occupation, parental education, and number of books at home);
- Immigrant status and language use; and
- Home-based IT resources (number of computers or laptops and internet access at home).
After reviewing the bivariate relationships between each of the indicators and the CIL test scores, we report the results of a multivariate regression analysis that we conducted in order to (1) explore the influence of different indicators on CIL after we had controlled for all other indicators, and (2) how much three different types of factor (students’ personal background, socioeconomic background, and home ICT resources) contributed to the explanation of variation in CIL. We chose not to include immigrant status and language in the multivariate analysis because many of the ICILS countries had only very small numbers of immigrants or students who spoke languages other than the language of the ICILS assessment at home.