The Moderation Examination of ICT Use on the Association Between Chinese Mainland Students' Socioeconomic Status and Reading Achievement

This study explores the moderation effect of the information and communication technology (ICT) on the association between students' socioeconomic status and their reading achievement. In total, 9,596 samples of 15 years old from 268 schools in mainland China are drawn from the latest wave of the public database - Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015. This study applies the moderation model in multiple regression analysis to respectively analyze the moderation effect of 2 composite variables of students' ICT use, i.e., ICT use for schoolwork and ICT use for leisure. Two significant results are reported: (1) students' ICT use for schoolwork or for leisure can moderate the relationship between their socioeconomic status and their reading achievement; (2) the high-level ICT use for schoolwork or for leisure may narrow the gap in students' reading achievement caused by different socioeconomic status deduced from the buffering moderation effect of the moderating variables. These findings might provide insights to future studies in educational equality promotion, infrastructure construction and pedagogy improvement in reading education.