The paper introduces the student-coined term digital instinct which describes students' disposition to resorting to digital technology for solving problems and doing school assignments. Taking cues from the term digital instinct, the paper describes a student perspective on digital literacy emerging from 100 lived experience descriptions and interviews with 37 Danish upper secondary students. The findings show that students' digital practice is characterised by experience-based, intuitive and familiar use of technologies. Most notably, students employ digital technologies as cognitive partners that help them carry on with assignments that they initially did not understand, but that they were able to complete with the help of the computer. The study examines the nature of this partnership through the words of the students and identifies how technologies expand student agency but fall short of a reflective use of digital technologies. Recognising the strengths and weaknesses of students' digital practices may inform the concept of digital literacy and encourage teachers to acknowledge the digital instinct as a steppingstone to foster students' reflective use of digital technologies.Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topicStudents have inadequate command of digital literacies as described in curricular terminology.Students have positive as well as negative perceptions of the value and usefulness of digital technologies in school.Students both over- and underestimate their own digital literacies.What this paper addsStudents have a fundamental utilitarian conception of digital technologies that either make schoolwork easier or more difficult, and they do not articulate that their use of digital technologies provides them with digital literacies.Students' conception of a digital instinct describes an intuitive and familiar, albeit unreflected, use of technologies where students employ experience-based and self-taught methods for using digital technologies.The digital instinct accounts for a feeling of agency among students, manifested in a widespread confidence that they can do assignments and solve problems when they make use of their computer.Implications for practice and/or policyCurricular terminologies struggle to capture what students can and cannot do with technology, and how much they understand the underlying technology.Teachers can involve and build on students' experience-based digital practices as a starting point for developing digital literacy among students-also as an entry to a curricular perspective.Teachers should acknowledge students' conception of a 'digital instinct' as an important disposition in its own right.
