The effects of ICT-based social media on adolescents' digital reading performance: A longitudinal study of PISA 2009, PISA 2012, PISA 2015 and PISA 2018

The increasing importance of digital reading and the prevalence of social media among adolescents necessitate further investigations into the effects of social media on the development of students' digital reading proficiency, which could foster proper behavior and attitudes regarding social media and help narrow achievement gaps in reading education. Thus, this study aimed to investigate the effects of information and communication technology (ICT)-based social media factors, categorized into use and attitudinal factors, on adolescents' digital reading performance and to capture the trajectory of the impacts on generations of adolescents over nine years. Data from 767,511 15-year-old students from 57 countries/regions in total were extracted from the four cycles of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) database, i.e., PISA 2009, PISA 2012, PISA 2015 and PISA 2018. Hierarchical linear models were constructed to investigate significant student-, school- and country-level factors. The findings indicated that a) the effects of ICT-based social media use outside of school varied across different purposes and types of use and the influential patterns remained relatively unchanged; b) students' use of ICT-based social media at school was negatively correlated with digital reading performance in general from PISA 2009 to PISA 2018; and c) students with positive attitudes towards ICT-based social media performed better on the digital reading assessment than those with negative attitudes.