How self-efficacious are secondary students in using ICT? Latent profiles and associated antecedents

Abstract

Students’ effective use of Information and communication technologies (ICT) is closely associated with their ICT self-efficacy. However, previous related research has often treated students as a homogeneous group and overlooked individual differences in their ICT self-efficacy. Adopting a social cognitive perspective, we utilized latent class analysis on 8,037 Finnish students from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2022 to explore the profiles of students’ ICT self-efficacy and their associations with contextual factors. Four ICT self-efficacy profiles were identified: Low (13.4%), Moderate (29.4%), High (42.1%), and Programming Weakness (15.1%). Profile membership was significantly predicted by student gender, socioeconomic status, ICT availability at home and at school, quality of ICT access, use of ICT in inquiry-based learning activities, and use of ICT for school activities outside the classroom significantly predicted profile membership. Conversely, subject-related ICT use during lessons showed no significant associations. Age did not distinguish any profile from the High profile, although two small differences emerged in supplementary pairwise comparisons. These findings contribute by identifying a domain-specific Programming Weakness profile and by showing that the antecedents relate to the profiles differently rather than uniformly, which can help educators and policymakers tailor support to different subgroups and strengthen students’ ICT self-efficacy.