Acknowledging that learning in the 21st-century is substantially influenced by the use of digital technologies in formal and informal educational contexts and ICT-related skills are regarded as indispensable for future political, social and personal objectives, this paper evaluates on the basis of ICILS 2013 data the relation of out-of school digital media use for both education-related and recreational purposes and the computer and information literacy performance comparing four European countries. ICILS 2013 and other studies have already shown that the use of digital technology is more relevant to students at home than in school in most countries (Facer & Furlong, 2001; Fraillon et al., 2014; Senkbeil et al., 2014). However, the question of whether computer and information literacy is influenced by education-related use of ICT (e.g. looking up information for homework) as well as recreational purposes (e.g. chatting with friends or downloading music) remains unanswered. Hence, it is of interest for educational researchers to evaluate (a) the relations between education-related and recreational activities at home and the computer and information literacy of students and (b) the extent to which those relations are influenced by social disparities, which also became evident in ICILS 2013. Using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) techniques and the representative multi-stratified cross-sectional sampling approach of ICILS 2013, this paper examines the relations between student background, education-related and recreational computer and internet activities and the computer and information literacy of 8th-graders in a representative sample of about 10,000 students from Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany acknowledging the importance of students’ background. The results indicate that the relevance of education-related and recreational activities seems to be similar across the focused countries. In this context, in-depth analyses show that family background characteristics moderate the extent to which computers and the internet are used for education-related and recreational activities.

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