Digital Learning Environments and Financial Literacy: A Multilevel Analysis of ICT Conditions in PISA 2022

As financial transactions and information increasingly migrate to digital platforms, finan-cial literacy is becoming closely connected to digital competence. This study examineshow information and communication technology (ICT) conditions at the student, school,and country levels are associated with adolescents’ financial literacy performance, usingdata from 57,970 15-year-old students across 14 countries participating in the Programmefor International Student Assessment (PISA) 2022. Using a multilevel modeling approach,the analysis situates financial literacy within digitally mediated learning environments thatstructure how students engage with technology-based assessment tasks across levels of theeducation system. The findings indicate that while individual ICT access and school-leveldigital policies initially show positive associations with performance, these relationshipslargely disappear after accounting for socioeconomic background. In contrast, students’perceived quality of ICT access at school remains positively associated with financial lit-eracy in the fully adjusted model, suggesting that the reliability and functionality of digitalinfrastructures shape how students engage with digitally mediated financial tasks. Nationaldigital readiness—measured using the Network Readiness Index—explains part of thebetween-country variation but operates primarily as a distal contextual factor. Overall, thefindings suggest that educational inequalities in financial literacy are linked not only todigital access but also to the quality and integration of digital environments in students’learning experiences, which serve as the foundational infrastructure for deploying futureadaptive and personalized learning systems.