Nineteen economies participated in OECD’s PISA 2009 Digital Reading Literacy Study. The International Report (OECD, 2011), entitled “PISA 2009 results: Students on line: Digital technologies and performance”, provides a detailed account of performance in digital reading, navigation, and computer use at home and at school. Korea is the top-performing country in digital reading by a significant margin, with a mean score of 568, and analyses show that the proficient digital readers tend to know how to navigate effectively and efficiently. In most economies, using a computer at home is related to digital reading performance, but this is not always true for computer use at school (OECD, 2011, pp. 19-21).

In all economies females outperform males in digital reading, and the gender gap is narrower in digital reading than in print reading (OECD, 2011, p.19-21). Amongst males and females with similar levels of proficiency in print reading, males tend to have stronger digital navigation skills and therefore score higher in digital reading. One explanation is attributed to the greater ease of males than females navigating in the digital medium (OECD, 2012). Drawing upon the data collected in the PISA 2009 Digital Reading Literacy Study, the present study seeks to identify student-level mediating variables in the explanation of gender differences in digital reading literacy in the three economies, i.e. Macao, Hong Kong, and Korea.

The patterns of gender gaps in favor of females in digital and print reading are very similar for Macao, Hong Kong and Korea. The sizes of the gaps are all below the OECD averages, with Korea’s slightly larger than that of Macao, and Macao’s in turn slightly larger than that of Hong Kong (OECD, 2012).  Macao and Hong Kong are two special administrative regions of Chinese Mainland. Because of very different historical background that has an impact on the educational system, Hong Kong outperforms Macao by a wide margin in both print and digital reading literacy in the PISA 2009 study (OECD, 2010, 2011). Although Hong Kong and Macao both share a common Chinese cultural heritage, their social backgrounds and educational systems are not only very different, but also in many aspects different from that of the top-performing economy, Korea.

Since PISA is the only public assessment practicing for Macao’s 15-years obligatory basic education, it is very important for educational practitioners and Government to learn from the successful educational, experiences of the two East Asian high-performing economies, Hong Kong and Korea. It is of interest for the three economies to compare from a comparative education perspective on how gender gaps in digital reading literacy can be explained in terms of computer use at school and at home, diversity of reading materials, kinds of online reading activities, and cognitive and affective factors conducive to literacy acquisition and development. The basic research question of the present study is: What mediating variables can explain gender differences in digital reading literacy in Macao, Hong Kong and Korea?

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