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New Delhi: A larger percentage of students between the age of 14 and 16 use smartphones for browsing social media than for educational purposes, but also know how to use basic safety features like changing passwords, according to the Annual Status of Education Report ASER released on Tuesday.
This is the first time the survey that maps schooling and learning in rural India has included digital literacy as one of the key parameters in its investigation.
The report says 82.2 per cent of all children in the 14-16 age group know how to use a smartphone. Of these, 57 per cent reported using it for an educational activity in the week preceding the survey, while 76 per cent said that they had used it for social media.
In other key findings of the report facilitated by an NGO “Pratham”, almost 9 out of 10 students reported having smartphones at home of which 8 knew how to use it.
However, there is a large gender gap in the ownership of smartphones among students who can use the device. 36.2 per cent of boys as compared to 26.9 per cent of girls reported owning their own smartphone in the survey.
Among children who used social media, knowledge of basic ways to protect themselves online was relatively high. 62 per cent knew how to block or report a profile, 55.2 per cent knew how to make a profile private, and 57.7 per cent knew how to change a password.
Boys’ awareness of these safety features was substantially higher than girls’ across a majority of the states.
More than 75 per cent of the students who brought their devices on the day of the survey could perform basic tasks like setting an alarm, browsing for a specific piece of information, and locating a YouTube video.
Overall, the boys fared better than the girls in performing these tasks.
Some southern states like Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Kerala, were outliers where girls either outperformed boys or matched the digital skills displayed by boys.
In Karnataka, 82.2 per cent of girls could find a video on YouTube compared to 81.4 per cent of boys.
The survey mapped over 6 lakh students spread over 605 districts in 29 states and Union Territories showed that an increase in government school enrolment seen during the Covid-19 pandemic seems to have reversed in the children aged 6-14 years.
The report also found that the proportion of children aged five years or below in Class 1 is decreasing over time.