Peer-reviewed article
Online Safety as a New Component of Digital Literacy for Young People
Łukasz Tomczyk, Ludvík Eger ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study measured digital literacy skills in 1,693 upper-secondary school students aged 15–21 in Poland and Czechia, focusing on online safety as a component of digital competence. The research used a diagnostic test with 18 questions to assess knowledge of threats from new media. Results showed that most students had gaps in digital literacy, particularly regarding copyright knowledge, while stronger skills were in online shopping. The study found gender differences, with girls stronger in soft competencies and boys in technical aspects.
Key points
- Only 41.41% of students obtained good or very good results in digital literacy competence testing
- Copyright-related knowledge was the weakest area of digital literacy among students
- Online shopping and financial operations were the strongest digital literacy components
- Gender differences emerged: girls performed better on soft competencies, boys on technical aspects
- All digital literacy components are interrelated, with improvement in one area supporting development of others
Limitations
This is a cross-sectional study without a comparison or control group, so it cannot determine causation or the effectiveness of interventions. The document does not evaluate any specific educational intervention or training program, only measures existing competence levels.
Abstract
Introduction. Digital literacy refers to the skills required to achieve digital competence, the confident and critical use of information and communication technology for le arning, leisure, communication and future work of young people. Digital competence has a dual nature. First of all, it is the technical ability to operate programs, pages, equipment. Secondly, it is also the ability to use digital media safely. Both perspectives are important in the educational perspective, i.e. media educat ion and socialisation. Materials and Methods. The paper presents the attempts to measure digital literacy in the area of threats resutling from using the new media in the group of upper-secondary school students (fourth educational cycle). The study was carried out using a diagnostic test with 18 questions. The research was conducted in the group of 1693 youths aged 15–21. The research was designed based on traditional methods of testing knowledge and skills. Results. The findings showed that the weakest digital literacy component was the copyright-related knowledge and the strongest area was online shopping and financial operations. All digital literacy components are interrelated. The improvement in one area leads to the development of other digital literacy elements. Despite this correlation, digital literacy is a heterogeneous concept. There are also differences regarding certain digital literacy components, determined by gender – girls obtained higher test results in terms of the soft competencies whereas boys were better with the technical aspects of digital literacy. Based on the cluster analysis, we noticed that 41.41% of the students obtained good and very good results from the competence test. More than half of the students require further education in most of the analysed areas. Discussion and Conclusion. For educational decision-makers, the findings highlight the importance of designing training programs aimed at developing students’ digital literacies, with a special focus on new topics as sexting, piracy and cyberbullying.