In the past, several studies have investigated the relationship between gender and socioeconomic status
on the one hand, and students' ICT competences on the other. In this research field, two problems seem
to occur. First, research findings are inconclusive. Second, most studies are conducted from the
perspective of self-perceived ICT competence. Such measures suffer from self-reported bias, as they
depend on students' own judgment of their ICT competences. This study aims to tackle both these
problems. First, the outline of the design of a computer and performance-based assessment test that
measures primary school students' ICT competences in a direct and valid way is presented. Second, the
relationship between gender and socioeconomic status, and the students' results on the test i.e. their
actual ICT competences was investigated. The performance-based test was administered to a represen-
tative sample of 378 sixth-grade students of 58 primary schools. The results of this study indicate that
primary school students in general have particular difficulties in higher-order ICTcompetences that focus
on communicating in a socially acceptable and clearly understandable way. Moreover, results show that
girls have better technical ICT skills and higher-order ICT competences than boys. With regard to so-
cioeconomic status, results show that the educational level of the mother is positively related to both
students' technical ICT skills and higher-order ICT competences.
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