Access of primary school students to information and communication technologies in Turkey

Abstract

Abstract This comparative research aims to investigate 6- to 10-year-old students’ access to information and communication technologies (ICTs), their purposes of using these technologies, and their place in distance education in Turkey. To achieve this aim, the level of students’ access to ICT was determined from an interregional and between-countries perspective by reviewing the relevant literature. The document analysis method was used to analyze the contents of the materials in the corpus. Besides, the research study was built on the statistical data published by the OECD, the Turkish Statistical Institute, and the Ministry of National Education, published official documents, news, and other literature materials related to the subject. In the 2019–2020 academic year, 7,383,213 students at public schools of the Ministry of National Education actively used the Education and Informatics Network (EBA) system. Given 5,328,391 students in primary schools only, around 3.6 million students did not have regular access to the EBA system. All the tiers considered, a total of 11 million students could not access the EBA system. To enable the wider student masses to actively use distance education platforms, the online learning environments must be accessible to everyone and usable without any problems.