Abstract
The present research analyses the impact that the time spent on the Internet by primary school (3rd and 6th grade) students may have on their academic progression in terms of test scores. In order to go beyond a correlational analysis, we have applied a time fixed-effects estimation using a recent longitudinal database of 15,974 students from the Spanish region of the Canary Islands. Our results show that, in general, an increasingly frequent use of the Internet has a negative influence on students’ academic achievement progression, with higher use of instant messaging applications being particularly linked to girls’ poorer mathematics academic performance progression. This negative influence may be a consequence of replacing time to academic activities (e.g., reading books or homework) with time using the Internet, which can also ultimately lead students to adopt unhealthy study habits that can affect their future academic success. Furthermore, we find that there is not a negative impact of playing videogames on the mathematics competence, as the development of spatial-visual (digital) skills possibly counterbalances the negative influence of time substitution between academically oriented tasks and the Internet.
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Data availability
The datasets analysed during the current study are not publicly available. They were obtained from the Canary Agency for University Quality and Educational Assessment for exclusive use by the authors.
Notes
Although more recent could be useful for the present analysis, this is the most recent existing census dataset.
These results and the ones obtained from the estimates of the econometric models were obtained using the STATA software, version 17.0, which provides commands to perform Ordinary Least Squares (“regress”) and time fixed-effects analysis (“xtreg” or “areg”).
These variables have been standardised using population’s mean and standard deviation, in order to report our results as effect sizes, for international comparison purposes.
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This work has been partly supported by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (under Research Project PID2020-119471RB-I00); Andalusian Regional Government (SEJ-645); the Universidad de Málaga under Research Project B1-2022_23 and the Fundación Ramón Areces. We also acknowledge the scholarship FPU20/01509 of the Ministerio de Universidades and the training received from the Programa de Doctorado en Economía y Empresa of the Universidad de Malaga.
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de Guevara Rodríguez, M.L., Lopez-Agudo, L.A. & Marcenaro-Gutierrez, O.D. The impact of different uses of the Internet on students’ performance progression throughout primary education. Educ Inf Technol (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-023-12354-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-023-12354-8