The ongoing digitalization of every part of personal life challenges schools to prepare students with digital skills needed to handle future expectations in their professional life and to ensure that students have the skillset to be independent as was well as an engaged part of society. In this light, initiatives such as the Digital Education Plan of the European Commission or organisations such as the OECD (2020) identify computer- and information-related skills as a central aim of today’s education (European Commission, 2020). In this context, the large-scale International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS 2018) of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) observed that eighth-graders’ computer and information literacy (CIL) is subject to tremendous social disparities in all participating countries (Fraillon et al., 2020). Against the results that students from low SES backgrounds score on average significantly lower in all countries that participated in ICILS 2018, a minority of the schools scored high despite their low-SES student body composition (Drossel et al., 2020). Referring to the psychological trait of resilience, these schools are regarded as organizationally resilient (Henderson & Milstein, 2003).

Research on organizationally resilient schools in other educational domains (reading, mathematics, science), on the one hand, suggests that organizationally resilient schools differ from non-resilient schools in their input and process characteristics (Muijs, et al., 2004). On the other hand, for the CIL domain, the relation of these variables with students’ CIL achievement at resilient schools remains rather unexplored (Eickelmann et al., 2019). Therefore, this contribution will focus on differences in school-level antecedents and process factors of resilient and non-resilient schools in the CIL domain by focusing on European countries. Hence, the contextual model of ICILS 2018, distinguishing between antecedents and process factors at the level of the home environment, the classroom and school level, and the level of the wider community (Fraillon et al., 2019), is used as the theoretical framework.

Research towards characteristics of organizationally resilient schools suggests that the availability of educational technology or principal leadership are relevant factors (Muijs et al., 2003). However, although empirical research findings towards educational resilience in the CIL domain are not readily available, research suggests several factors to be important for the achievement of digital skills. On the input level for example, the availability of ICT (Petko, Cantieni & Prasse, 2016), characteristics such as teachers attitudes towards instruction with ICT (Eickelmann & Vennemann, 2017) or their computer-related self-efficacy (Hatlevik, 2017) have shown to be important. Antecedents are complemented by process factors which are also regarded to be relevant when CIL achievement is the focus. Here, Fraillon et al. (2019) identify the ICT use for teaching itself as a relevant process prerequisite to support CIL achievement (Gerick, 2018). Furthermore, teachers’ emphasis of fostering CIL achievement in class is regarded as equally important as teacher cooperation (Drossel & Eickelmann, 2017; Tondeur, 2012). In contrast to those overarching results, only few secondary analyses address organizational resilience in the CIL domain (Drossel et al., 2020; Eickelmann et al., 2019). Here, authors showed that among all participating countries, resilient schools are the minority: Only 5.3% of schools of the ICILS-2018-sample were regarded as organizationally resilient. Furthermore, in some countries no resilient schools could be identified (Moscow, Kazakhstan, Luxembourg). In the remaining countries, the proportion of resilient schools is subject to variation.

Altogether, it remains rather unclear if resilient schools differ from non-resilient schools in their input and process characteristics. Therefore, this contribution will address the following research question:

• Are there differences between resilient and non-resilient schools in the CIL domain with regard to their input and process factors in European countries?

In this contribution, secondary analysis of the data gathered by IEA-ICILS 2018, which provided internationally comparable data on the achievement of eighth-graders’ CIL comprised of extensive background information from students (i.e. socioeconomic background), teachers (i.e. use of ICT for teaching and learning), principals (school’s general preconditions) and so-called ICT coordinators (ICT equipment available), is conducted. Using a multi-stage cluster sampling approach, researchers in ICILS 2018 were able to provide representative insights into eighth-graders’ CIL achievement and its conditions of acquisition in the eight educational systems and benchmarking participants from the European Union (c.f Fraillon et al., 2019). For the purpose of answering the research question, descriptive analyses and significance testing via t-test is applied to three selected input and three process factors that were identified as important by previous works and assessed by the ICILS 2018 teacher questionnaire (ibid.): (1) Availability of ICT, (2) teachers attitudes towards the potentials of ICT for teaching and learning, (3) teachers’ ICT-related self-efficacy (as indicators for school input conditions), (4) frequency of ICT use in school, (5) the role of fostering students’ CIL in school, and (6) the extent of teacher cooperation for the improvement of learning with ICT (as indicators for process factors). In order to identify organizationally resilient and non-resilient schools, the first step was to aggregate students’ individual data (plausible values of CIL and HISEI) on the school level to determine the average achievement and SES of each school. The ranges of these aggregated CIL and HISEI scores were divided by country into three equally wide spans. In a second step, schools were regarded as organizationally resilient if they originated from the lower third of the HISEI spectrum and belonged to the upper third of the CIL spectrum. These procedures fully correspond with those proposed by previous research towards organizational resilience in the CIL domain (Drossel et al., 2020; Eickelmann et al., 2019). All analyses in this contribution acknowledge for the complex sampling approach of ICILS 2018 via using case-weighting and the so-called Jackknife Repeated Replication Technique (JRR) to correct standard errors (SE) with respect to the applied cluster-sampling approach. Analyses involving students’ CIL assessment data acknowledge the plausible value approach by performing each analysis with each of the plausible values and averaging the results afterwards (cf. Mikheeva & Meyer, 2019).

With respect to the addressed research question (differences between resilient and non-resilient schools), results show that only in single countries or benchmarking participants from the IEA-ICILS 2018 EU sample do statistically significant differences in focused input and process factors emerge (p <.05): In North Rhine-Westphalia (as a benchmarking participant from the EU member state Germany) resilient schools report that fostering students’ CIL plays a bigger role for teachers and that - in general - their attitudes towards teaching and learning with ICT is significantly more positive. With regard to ICT-related teacher cooperation in two educational systems, significant differences are evident: In Portugal and North Rhine-Westphalia organizationally resilient schools report a higher extent of ICT-related teacher cooperation compared to non-resilient schools in these systems. In other input and process factors, namely teachers’ ICT-related self-efficacy (as an input factor) and the frequency of ICT use in class, no differences between resilient and non-resilient schools were observed. Altogether, the results of the research question addressed indicate that resilient and non-resilient schools do not seem to differ systematically with respect to the six input and process factors examined in this contribution. This should lead future research to further examine the relation between school level factors and organizational resilience in order to reveal factors that help to answer the open research desiderate which input and process factors contribute or hinder organizational resilience in Europe. Besides quantitative analyses that should address differences in other school level factors such as principal leadership or the technological and/or pedagogical support available to schools, likewise in other domains (reading, mathematics, and science), qualitative approaches such as video studies may complement the complex picture of organizational resilience in the CIL domain.

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