A fresh approach for digital skills testing needed

Everything nowadays is digital and the COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced this trend. We want children and young people to be digitally skilled. But their digital skills are unequally distributed and this is not without consequences. We need digital skill indicators for individuals in order to be better placed to offer adequate support to those who need it the most. Without appropriate indicators how can we be certain about which areas of digital skills require more attention? Or how can we know which sectors of the population are in most need of support? Generating meaningful policies requires that they are firmly grounded on sound evidence and yet, when it comes to children’s engagement with digital technologies there is an underdevelopment of measures for testing the softer, non-technical skills that allow young people to creatively, critically and safely interact with digital technologies such as social media.

The overarching aim of ySKILLS is to enhance and maximise long-term positive impact of the ICT environment on multiple asects of wellbeing for all children and young people by stimulating resilience through the enhancement of digital skills. In order to achieve this overarching aim, the ySKILLS team seeks to acquire extensive knowledge and better measurement of digital skills in order to contribute to building evidence-based policy. We also aim to explain the uneven distribution of digital skills through a model that identifies the actors and factors and the pathways that lead to the acquisition of digital skills and their complex impacts on children's cognitive, physical and social wellbeing to generate insightful evidence-based recommendations and strategies for key stakeholder groups in order to promote European children’s digital skills and wellbeing.

In 2020, the first year of activities, the ySKILLS team held many online meetings, listened to children and spoke with experts from education and the labour market. We produced six content reports that looked at a multitude of definitions and measures of digital skills. Both broad and narrow definitions of digital skills are used in the literature. Such an exercise offers different perspectives for our view of the antecedents (e.g. social context of the child) and consequences of digital skills (e.g. offline opportunities). An important question in this regard is: Are we taking a multidimensional view of digital skills or are we looking at specific dimensions, such as information literacy or computer programming? We understand digital skills as a diverse set of operational, information navigation, communicative, and creative competences, which are unequally distributed and influenced by a number of individual and contextual variables.