Exploring the Effects of Socio-Economic Status, Motivation and ICT Use on Science Achievement: Findings from PISA 2015

The present study used the PISA 2015 dataset (n = 39,297) of six East Asian economies to investigate the relationship between students’ ICT-based learning and their science proficiency level. Using Mplus 7, CFA and SEM were conducted to obtain the three major findings. Firstly, students’ socio-economic status is highly related to students’ science proficiency level but is weakly related to ICT-based learning. Secondly, although both learning enjoyment and instrumental motivation are weakly, positively related to ICT-based learning, the association between learning enjoyment and students’ science proficiency level is much stronger than that between instrumental motivation and science proficiency level. Lastly, ICT efficacy is positively related to ICT-based learning, which in turn, is significantly and negatively related to science proficiency level.