Students' perceptions of their digital citizenship and practices

Students today need to become good digital citizens in order to operate successfully when reading, writing, learning, and interacting socially online. Digital citizenship depends on online access, mastery of technical skills for using digital devices, guidance from parents and teachers, and applying established social norms for online behavior. To investigate each of these aspects of digital citizenship, we examined the survey responses of 2,005 Grades 4 to 9 students (56% were female) who were randomly selected from 3,286 schools in Chongqing China. Virtually all students (96%) reported having internet access at home, and spent an average of 28 min online at home (SD = 25.42) and 17 min at school (SD = 28.94). Ninety-five percent of students were positive about their digital capabilities; 89% of them indicated online responsibilities and rights were taught at school; and 58% noted parents guided their internet use. On average, students slightly agreed that being online was important, but averaged moderate agreement they liked to read and write online for academic and social purposes, with reading online occurring weekly and writing online monthly. On average, students moderately agreed that they followed norms of digital netiquette, practiced safe online privacy behaviors, managed their digital footprint appropriately, balanced digital media use in healthy ways, and approached digital media in a literate manner. Nevertheless, 24% of students agreed they had been cyberbullied, 73% shared passwords with friends, 68% befriended strangers, 39% reshared posts, 78% used false personal information to register online, and 24% copied text directly from online sources when doing homework. Measures of digital citizenship were statistically related to student characteristics, internet use, and beliefs about online engagement. Implications for practice and future research are presented.