Engl. transl.: Findings from the first wave of the ySKILLS school survey - Italy

The present report briefly summarizes findings from the first wave of the ySKILLS survey, administered to a sample of 965 Italian pupils from 6 schools (3 lower secondary and 3 upper secondary) from the Milan area. It first contextualises the research by reporting on children’s background, focusing on individual and social characteristics. Then, data on children’s daily access to the internet, such as time spent online and devices used are provided. Following, a list of the most and least common online activities children engage in is presented; moving forward we report on Italian children’s digital skills across four dimensions (technological and operational, information and navigation, communication and interaction, content creation and production,). Finally, we report on the main risks Italian children are exposed to. When relevant, differences for age and gender are reported.

- Boys report to a higher extent (78%) to know how to deal with problems compared to girls (64%) - 96% reported using a smartphone - 96% have internet access at home, with 26% of the respondents reporting problems with internet access at least “sometimes” - No significant differences emerged in terms of time spent online between boys and girls, nor between older and younger children. - In terms of gender differences, boys are more likely to play games online than girls (76% vs. 29%) - Older children are more likely to communicate with parents and caregivers (87% vs. 77%), to communicate with friends (97% vs. 91%) and listen to music or watch videos online (87% vs 80%) - Girls are more likely than boys to look for information about mental health (10% vs. 4.6%) - Older students are more likely to follow the news (13% vs. 8%), while younger students are more likely to create and edit digital contents (22.4% vs. 15.5%) - Older students are more likely to have an online profile (94% vs 83%) - Girls are more likely to keep their online profiles private (91% vs. 76%) - Older students are more likely to accept friend requests from latent contacts (74% vs. 58%) - Older students were more likely to share a photo or video of themselves in a way that it could be viewed by strangers (58% vs. 38%) - Older students were more likely to join or follow a political group on SNSs (16% vs 10%) - Italian children score low on information and navigation digital skills (35%) and content creation and production skills (38%). Better scores are reported with respect to communication and interaction skills (65%) and technological and operational skills (56%) - Lower secondary school students children report higher content creation and information navigation skills. In fact, these students engage more in content creation (which may explain the higher skills), whereas upper secondary school students engage more in informational activities. These differences, however, are minimal and not statistically significant. - The differences in skills by gender are not surprising, and consistent with prior research showing how girls self-report higher communication skills. Moreover, it has been shown that boys tend to over-estimate their digital skills in self-report studies, while gender differences are less marked when looking at results from performance tests (Haddon et al., 2020). - Respondents answered a set of questions designed to measure their knowledge about how the internet and digital technologies work. The percentage of correct answers related to digital awareness is similar between boys and girls and increases with age. Although Italy ranked among the lowest, its score is not far from the average of the whole cross-national sample. - Overall, girls and older students are more likely to be exposed to cyberhate and harmful content. Boys and older students are more likely to see sexual content and receiving sexual messages - No significant differences emerged between boys and girls and older and younger students in feeling upset about cyberhate. - It is striking that most of respondents do not feel upset when seeing harmful contents. Most of the time it is girls and older students who feel upset, who are also the ones who see them the most. -