Gender inequality in digital reading!

Girls generally have a better understanding of electronic writing than boys, but the gap between the two genders is smaller than that of reading on paper, notes one. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) document On the question.

This conclusion is drawn from data from the 2009 PISA survey. “On average, in the 16 countries that took part in the two assessments, girls are 38 points ahead of boys - the equivalent of one year of study - in reading comprehension on paper, but 24 points in comprehension of electronic reading ”, one writes.

That said, when we compare young people with similar abilities in reading on paper, we see that boys score on average six points higher than that of girls! "One possible reason is that boys and girls do not have the same degree of ease in extracting and structuring information from electronic texts, and navigating between them," we say.

The authors of the document see it as a promising solution to achieve better performance in boys. “Boys' interest in electronic reading and their abilities in this area could be exploited to initiate a virtuous circle: more frequent reading of electronic texts would lead to an improvement in performance in reading comprehension which, in its opinion, in turn, would result in greater reading pleasure and improved performance in reading on paper, ”they note. That said, they do advise taking note of girls' weaker e-browsing skills as this is an important skill in the digital age.

In addition, we note that Australia, South Korea (which is setting up a paperless school program) and New Zealand are the countries with the largest number of top performers in electronic reading comprehension. The authors do not put forward any hypotheses to explain their superior performance.

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