Metacognition Explains the Gender Differences in Digital Reading Performance: A Multilevel Mediation Analysis

Abstract

Gender differences in reading have become a heated topic, and a reoccurring pattern of results is that girls outperform boys significantly. As digital reading prevails, the discrepancies in digital reading between girls and boys are also prominent. For the purpose of exploring the reason why boys lag behind in terms of digital reading performance and therefore unveil the underlying mechanism in improving students' digital reading literacy, this study used multilevel mediation analysis to investigate whether students' metacognition, i.e., metacognition of understanding, remembering, summarizing and assessing credibility, explain the gender differences in digital reading performance. This study adopted Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), launched by Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as the data source. Results of 12,058 samples from 361 schools in China showed that their better achievement in metacognition significantly mediated girls' excelling performance in digital reading. Pedagogical implementations focusing on metacognition were given to render help for both genders in digital reading performance.