The study was conducted across Southwest Nigeria, the homeland of the Yoruba people and one of the country’s six geopolitical zones. The region spans roughly 114,271 square kilometres and encompasses six states, 137 local government areas, and an extraordinary concentration of heritage resources, including the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, alongside numerous sites on Nigeria’s UNESCO Tentative List. The researchers focused on four states, Lagos, Osun, Oyo, and Ondo, examining four museums and four heritage sites, among them the Old Iga Idunganran Palace in Lagos, the Old Palace of the Deji of Akure, and the Alaafin of Oyo Palace. The John Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History in Lagos was included as the region’s flagship digital museum, providing a rare point of comparison with the conventional, largely analogue practices that dominate the National Commission for Museums and Monuments institutions.

Methodologically, the research combined qualitative and quantitative approaches. Structured interviews were conducted with twenty-four participants, including digital heritage experts, museum professionals, and visitors, while questionnaires based on key performance indicators for digital heritage were distributed to a stratified random sample of 340 stakeholders drawn from museum staff, ICOMOS members, ICT personnel, and site visitors. A 70 percent response rate yielded 238 completed questionnaires, which were analysed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. Respondents rated statements on a Likert scale, allowing the researchers to map where consensus existed and where it fractured. The strongest agreement, with the lowest mean score of 1.4747, concerned the belief that digitisation significantly improves the conservation of cultural heritage resources, a signal of what the authors describe as institutional optimism despite low actual adoption.

That optimism, however, collides with a sobering structural reality. Every single respondent, 100 percent, agreed that considerable obstacles stand in the way of technology adoption. The barriers cluster into three interlinked dimensions identified by the researchers: low institutional readiness, evidenced by inadequate funding, bureaucratic bottlenecks, and the absence of intellectual property policies; low technological capacity, reflected in unreliable electricity, poor internet connectivity, a shortage of skilled personnel, and concerns over digital format obsolescence; and what the authors call conditional social acceptance, in which communities are willing to engage with digitisation only if it respects cultural authenticity, custodial rights, and local languages. Government funding, respondents noted, is often insufficient even for the day-to-day running of museums, leaving nothing for digital equipment or training.

The interviews brought these abstractions to life. One respondent described how the delay in implementing digital technologies hinders the ability to conserve and showcase cultural assets, while another pointed to the lack of digital infrastructure and technical expertise as a major barrier requiring external support. Others highlighted the convoluted administrative processes and red tape associated with government approval procedures, and the practical impossibility of cloud-based archiving or virtual tours without reliable power and connectivity. Intellectual property concerns proved especially acute: respondents feared that sacred artifacts, once placed online, could be copied, misused, or misrepresented, and the absence of clear guidelines on who owns digitised communal heritage creates legal uncertainty that discourages both institutions and communities from digitising at all.

Against this backdrop, the John Randle Centre stands out as a telling exception. It was the only institution in the study singled out as exemplifying the potential of digital preservation, and the researchers interpret its success as evidence of what becomes possible when funding, political will, and technical partnership converge. Its status as an outlier, they argue, highlights the unevenness of digital readiness across the region: while one institution can showcase advanced digitisation, most remain anchored in conventional methods due to constrained resources and risk-averse institutional cultures. A small minority of respondents, about 5 percent, defended a cautious ‘watch and learn’ approach, arguing that states should wait until proven, locally adaptable models demonstrate tangible benefits before committing scarce resources.

The benefits of digitisation, where it has been attempted, are not in dispute among most stakeholders. Seventy-five percent of respondents affirmed that digital technologies improve accessibility, documentation, public engagement, disaster recovery, social identity, and community empowerment. Digital access can bypass geographical barriers in a region where physical infrastructure and transport are often poor, reaching remote communities, people with mobility challenges, and diaspora audiences who cannot visit sites in person. Digital documentation enables more efficient inventorying, conservation planning, and risk management, compensating for weak manual record-keeping systems. Perhaps most compelling is the disaster recovery function: digital backups serve as a form of insurance against flooding, urban encroachment, and insecurity, threats that are particularly salient in Nigeria, where institutional readiness for emergency response remains low.

Yet a significant minority, 25 percent of respondents, raised concerns that digitisation could erode cultural authenticity. They argued that digital versions might dissuade tourists from visiting physical sites, diminishing the economic benefits that fund preservation, and that intangible cultural experiences, the rituals, performances, and embodied practices that give heritage its meaning, simply cannot be replicated on a screen. Some questioned whether institutions currently possess the technological capacity to maintain digital files over the long term, given persistent power and infrastructure challenges, noting that without proper maintenance, digital archives are vulnerable to corruption, loss, or obsolescence. These concerns, the researchers stress, do not amount to a rejection of technology but rather a demand that digitisation complement, rather than replace, lived heritage experience, for example by using virtual previews to drive physical visits.

The study’s theoretical grounding in the UNESCO Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage reinforces this balanced framing. The Charter recognises digital heritage as an integral component of humanity’s cultural legacy that requires deliberate preservation strategies to address technological obsolescence, maintain authenticity, and ensure long-term accessibility. Contemporary scholarship cited by the authors similarly advocates participatory and culturally sensitive approaches, including co-design platforms, crowdsourced documentation, and culturally responsive digital curation frameworks that reflect local values and knowledge systems. The Nigerian findings suggest that sustainable digitisation in resource-constrained settings cannot depend on high-cost imported models but requires a frugal, hybrid, community-anchored framework in which traditional custodians act as co-creators of the digital archive.

The authors close with concrete recommendations: a comprehensive national digital heritage strategy developed in consultation with stakeholders, dedicated government funding, capacity-building programmes for heritage professionals, partnerships among government, private sector, and international organisations, and incentive schemes such as tax credits or grants to mobilise private investment. For other developing countries facing similar constraints, the study distils three lessons: participatory co-design ensures authenticity and community ownership; low-cost, offline-capable tools and local-language content are more viable than infrastructure-heavy solutions; and clear policy on data sovereignty and community intellectual property is a prerequisite for trust. Whether Nigeria’s extraordinary heritage, from the bronzes of Benin to the terracottas of Nok and the sacred groves of Osogbo, can be secured for future generations may depend on how quickly those lessons are put into practice.

Subject of Research: Digital technology adoption for cultural heritage preservation in Southwest Nigeria

Article Title: Assessment of digital technology adoption for cultural heritage preservation in Southwestern Nigeria

Article References: Ale, T. A., Ayeni, D. A., Ayoola, H. A., & Ale, T. O. (2026). Assessment of digital technology adoption for cultural heritage preservation in Southwestern Nigeria. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 269. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00585-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00585-2

Keywords: cultural heritage, digital preservation, digitisation, Nigeria, museums, UNESCO, Yoruba, heritage management, ICT, cultural authenticity, disaster recovery, developing countries

The study addresses a challenge that has become a global imperative: improving digital teacher training at a moment when Information and Communication Technologies continue to reshape the educational landscape. As the authors note, educators increasingly need to embrace new pedagogical approaches rather than simply layering technology onto traditional lectures. Their answer was to combine two complementary innovations. The flipped classroom model, popularized by Bergmann and Sams, inverts the conventional sequence of instruction: students first encounter new material at home through videos and guided activities, and then use classroom time for interactive, teacher-supported work that would traditionally have been homework. Virtual reality, meanwhile, was deployed not as a gimmick but as a means of reconstructing a past that no longer exists physically, allowing students to walk through the medieval walls and castle of Priego de Córdoba in their original state.

The research design was deliberately grounded in local heritage, which gave the virtual content an emotional resonance that generic educational software often lacks. Priego de Córdoba, known in the Islamic period as Madinat Baguh, preserves only fragments of its medieval fortifications, and the castle visible today differs substantially from its original form. Using digital reconstruction techniques, the team created immersive scenarios showing the walls, the walkway, the access doors, the castle, and its keep as they stood during the Middle Ages, together with the modifications introduced after the Christian conquest. Students first worked through at-home video activities covering the town’s Islamic origins and its conquest by Fernando III, then located the virtual scenarios on an urban plan, and finally explored the reconstructed environments interactively, pressing on the screen to reveal characteristic medieval elements hidden within each scene.

The pedagogical sequence was structured across four activities. The first two were completed at home and required students to watch linked videos and answer questions about archaeological remains, the Muslim settlement of the town, the Christian conquest, the military order that subsequently guarded Priego, and the function of specific buildings. The third activity took place in the classroom, where students used an interactive urban scene projected by the teacher, alongside a printed urban plan, to locate the walls, walkway, gates, castle, and keep on a map of the municipality. The fourth activity was the virtual reality experience itself, in which students matched each immersive scenario to its location on the plan and then discovered interactive medieval features within the reconstruction. This progression, from passive video comprehension to active spatial reasoning and finally to embodied exploration, reflects the logic of Bloom’s revised taxonomy, moving students from remembering and understanding toward applying and analyzing.

Safety and ethics were treated with unusual rigor for a classroom study. Each student completed two VR sessions of approximately five minutes each, totaling ten minutes per participant, with short breaks as needed and continuous supervision by the instructor. Before donning the headset, students received instructions on correct placement, safe posture, and the importance of reporting any discomfort immediately. The instructor monitored for dizziness, nausea, headache, eye strain, blurred vision, disorientation, anxiety, and loss of balance, with protocols in place to stop the activity instantly if any symptom appeared. Students who chose not to continue with the immersive experience could perform an alternative non-immersive task targeting the same learning objectives, without any academic repercussions. Notably, no adverse events of any kind occurred during the study, and no medical attention was required. Written informed consent was obtained from parents or legal guardians, students gave age-appropriate assent, and all data were anonymized and handled in accordance with the GDPR and Spanish data protection law.

The academic results were compelling, though the authors are careful to frame them appropriately. Using a single-group quasi-experimental design, the researchers compared student performance on a first-quarter unit taught with conventional methods against performance on a second-quarter unit delivered with the flipped classroom plus virtual reality approach. Students obtained higher scores under the new methodology, and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test, a non-parametric statistical procedure suited to comparing paired scores from the same group, revealed a significant difference between the two conditions, with a Z statistic of minus 3.039 and a p-value of 0.002. The effect size, calculated as r equal to 0.62, is considered large by conventional standards, meaning the observed improvement was not merely statistically detectable but substantively meaningful. Perhaps most striking, the proportion of students achieving excellence grades rose from 37.5 percent under the traditional method to 87.5 percent under the combined FC plus VR approach.

The research team is candid about the limits of these numbers. Because the study involved a single group of just twenty-four students and lacked a randomized control group, the findings should be interpreted as observed differences within this particular sample rather than as definitive causal proof. Factors such as topic difficulty, seasonal effects, novelty, and the enthusiasm of participating in an innovative project could all have contributed to the gains. Nevertheless, the consistency between the quantitative outcomes and the qualitative evidence strengthens the overall picture. A survey of the student population and an interview with the subject teacher revealed overall satisfaction with the methodology, with respondents reporting higher levels of perceived understanding, attention, and engagement following the intervention. In educational research, where disengaged students are often the silent saboteurs of well-designed curricula, such alignment between performance and perception is a promising signal.

The study also situates itself within a broader body of evidence on immersive learning. Previous work has shown that virtual reality can aid recall, with research on virtual memory palaces demonstrating that immersion supports memory performance, and that desktop VR science simulations can be effective whether used at home or in class. Systematic reviews of augmented and virtual reality in primary and secondary education have documented growing interest in game-based immersive learning, while studies of the flipped classroom across disciplines, from mechanical engineering to medical education and veterinary science, have reported improvements in student perception and performance, alongside persistent challenges such as unequal access to technology and variable student attitudes toward learning from videos. The Spanish study adds a valuable data point by testing the combination of both approaches in a compulsory secondary education setting, a context where younger students and mandatory curricula pose distinct design constraints compared with the university settings where much of this literature has been generated.

What makes the Priego de Córdoba experiment resonate beyond its sample size is its vision of what digital teacher training can look like in practice. The intervention did not require exotic hardware or a wholesale redesign of the curriculum; it required a teacher willing to restructure class time, a set of locally meaningful digital reconstructions, and a disciplined safety protocol. The authors argue that the flipped classroom and virtual reality together represent a promising educational approach for secondary education, and their work contributes directly to ongoing international efforts to advance digital teacher training. For a town whose medieval walls survive only in fragments, the virtual reconstruction did more than teach history: it made the invisible past tangible, and in doing so it turned a routine Geography and History unit into the kind of learning experience that students, and their teachers, genuinely wanted to repeat. If replicated in larger, controlled studies, this model could offer schools everywhere a practical template for merging heritage, technology, and pedagogy.

Subject of Research: Flipped classroom and virtual reality resources in secondary school Geography and History education

Article Title: Application of the flipped classroom method and VR resources in a secondary school educational environment

Article References: García-Molina, D. F., Cáceres-Criado, I., Mercado-Colmenero, J. M., & Triviño-Tarradas, P. (2026). Application of the flipped classroom method and VR resources in a secondary school educational environment. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 85(9), Article 738. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-026-21891-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11042-026-21891-6

Keywords: virtual reality, flipped classroom, secondary education, educational technology, ICT, Geography and History, student engagement, digital teacher training, quasi-experimental study, immersive learning, Spain, academic performance

The analytical foundation of the study is the Environmental Kuznets Curve, the influential hypothesis holding that pollution rises with income during early industrialization and falls once a critical income threshold is passed, as economies shift toward cleaner technologies, service-oriented production, and stronger environmental preferences. The mechanism is conventionally decomposed into a scale effect, which raises emissions as output expands; a composition effect, which alters the sectoral structure of the economy; and a technique effect, which lowers the emissions intensity of production as incomes and abatement capacity grow. The inverted U emerges when the latter two effects eventually dominate the first. What has been missing, the authors argue, is digitalization, which acts on precisely the margins through which the curve operates, altering production technologies, the composition of output, and the intensity of energy and material use.

Theory offers reasons to expect digitalization to help and reasons to expect it to hurt. On the beneficial side sit four channels: efficiency gains from digital process control, smart grids, and predictive maintenance; dematerialization, as digital substitutes displace physically embodied goods; structural change, as digital diffusion accelerates the shift toward services; and improved monitoring and enforcement, as granular sensing lowers the cost of observing emissions. Against these stand three opposing forces: the growing electricity appetite of data centers and networks, the embodied emissions in hardware manufacturing and disposal, and the rebound effect, whereby efficiency gains lower effective costs and stimulate compensating consumption. Because these channels operate simultaneously and in opposition, the net effect cannot be resolved on theoretical grounds, which is exactly what makes the question empirical.

To measure digitalization properly, the researchers constructed a composite index rather than relying on a single indicator such as internet penetration. The index combines three measures drawn from International Telecommunication Union data: the share of individuals using the internet, mobile cellular subscriptions per hundred inhabitants, and fixed broadband subscriptions per hundred inhabitants. Using principal component analysis on pooled data from 1995 to 2022, they extracted a single underlying factor that accounts for nearly 85 percent of the variance across the three indicators, then rescaled it onto a range from zero to one hundred. Validation checks were reassuring: the index correlates at 0.99 with an equal-weighted alternative, at 0.94 with the ITU’s own ICT Development Index over the years it existed, and its internal consistency measured by Cronbach’s alpha reaches 0.92.

The sample was chosen with care. Fifteen economies, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, the Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, Türkiye, and Vietnam, span per capita incomes from roughly 620 dollars at the start of the period to about 14,300 dollars at its end, an interval that comfortably brackets the estimated turning point and allows the inverted U to be identified from within the data rather than extrapolated beyond it. The group also spans the full spectrum of digital diffusion, from economies where the internet was effectively absent in 1995 to those now approaching universal connectivity, and it ranges across coal-dependent, hydrocarbon-exporting, and hydro-intensive energy systems on four continents.

The methodological apparatus is deliberately demanding. Tests confirmed strong cross-sectional dependence, meaning the fifteen economies respond to common global shocks rather than evolving independently, and rejected slope homogeneity, meaning no single set of elasticities fits them all. Both findings forced the use of second-generation panel procedures robust to these features. The long-run estimates, obtained under five different estimators resting on different identifying assumptions, converge on a consistent picture: a positive income coefficient and a negative quadratic term support the inverted U, with an estimated turning point near 8,690 dollars per capita in constant 2015 terms, falling within the observed income range of the sample. Energy consumption emerges as the single most robust determinant of emissions, with an elasticity between 0.68 and 1.00 that is significant at the one percent level under every estimator, establishing the energy system as the binding constraint through which every other mechanism must operate.

Digitalization enters negatively in all five estimators, indicating that the efficiency and structural-change channels dominate the footprint and rebound effects in this sample, though the effect is small and reaches conventional significance only at the ten percent level in the pooled specification. Crucially, when the authors tested whether digitalization relocates the turning point itself by including an income-digitalization interaction, the interaction proved insignificant. The evidence therefore supports a level effect rather than a pivot: digital diffusion lowers the emissions associated with any given level of income without altering the income at which the relationship turns. The small magnitude of the net effect is consistent with prior work showing that the digital economy raises emissions directly while moderating the emissions generated by growth, two opposing channels of comparable magnitude producing a modest resultant.

The study’s most distinctive contribution lies in its treatment of adjustment dynamics. Conventional models impose a single speed at which emissions return to their long-run equilibrium path, but the economics of carbon lock-in predicts otherwise: correcting an overshoot requires retiring sunk fossil-fuel capital, which is slow and costly, while correcting an undershoot requires only fuller utilization of installed capacity, which is fast. Allowing the correction speed to depend on the direction of movement in the disequilibrium, the momentum-conditioned specification dominates its symmetric counterpart. Deviations that are widening correct at 10.8 percent per period, implying a half-life of roughly six years, while those that are narrowing correct at 24.8 percent, a half-life of about two and a half years. The system resists movement back toward equilibrium roughly two and a half times more strongly when emissions are drifting away from their long-run path than when they are returning to it. The authors are candid that bootstrap inference places the asymmetry at the ten percent significance level, making the finding suggestive rather than decisive, but its direction matches precisely what carbon lock-in theory predicts.

The policy implications follow directly. Because digitalization lowers the curve, green digital investment emerges as a decarbonization instrument compatible with the developmental imperatives that emerging economies cannot set aside, rather than a competitor for the resources those imperatives command. Because energy use remains the dominant driver of emissions, digital strategies must be pursued jointly with the decarbonization of energy supply rather than as a substitute for it, and the direct energy footprint of data centers and networks warrants explicit regulatory attention, including efficiency standards and requirements that new facilities be matched with additional renewable generation. Most pointedly, because emissions overshoots correct slowly, policymakers cannot rely on market-led reversion precisely in the regime where environmental damage is greatest. Binding standards, carbon pricing, and the deliberate removal of fossil-fuel subsidies are strengthened by the evidence, as is the case for coordinated international action given that emissions across these economies respond to common global shocks that no single country can address alone.

The study also acknowledges its limits. The digitalization index is a proxy for a multidimensional phenomenon, the modest number of countries limits the power of the bootstrap threshold test, and the analysis is associational rather than causal. Yet the central message stands with unusual clarity: the environmental consequences of growth in emerging economies are shaped not by income alone, nor even by income and digitalization together, but by the direction-dependent manner in which emissions adjust toward their long-run path. Half the world’s emissions now hang on economies whose digital transformation is flattening their pollution curve while their entrenched carbon infrastructure fights to keep it from falling fast.

Subject of Research: The relationship between digital transformation, carbon emissions, and asymmetric environmental adjustment in emerging economies

Article Title: Digital transformation, carbon emissions, and asymmetric environmental equilibrium in emerging economies

Article References: Sendi, A., Alofaysan, H., Alqayidi, A., & Mohammed, K. S. (2026). Digital transformation, carbon emissions, and asymmetric environmental equilibrium in emerging economies. Environmental and Sustainability Indicators, 32, Article 101522. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indic.2026.101522

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.indic.2026.101522

Keywords: digitalization, carbon emissions, Environmental Kuznets Curve, emerging economies, carbon lock-in, ICT, energy consumption, asymmetric adjustment, cointegration, climate policy, rebound effect, green digital investment

The study, published in the Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: does the amount of supervision children receive at home relate to their digital competence? To do so, the team assessed pupils across the five areas of the European Union’s DigComp framework, the continent’s standard yardstick for digital skills. These areas cover information and data literacy, communication and collaboration, digital content creation, safety, and problem solving. The framework, now in its version 2.2, has evolved from a checklist of instrumental computer skills into a model emphasising critical thinking, responsible digital citizenship and emerging concerns such as artificial intelligence, data verification and digital wellbeing.

The researchers used a quantitative, survey-based methodology. A purpose-designed questionnaire was validated by ten experts in digital competence, who rated the importance, relevance and clarity of each indicator on a four-point Likert scale. Reliability analysis returned a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.906 for the full instrument, a value conventionally regarded as very good, with dimension-level values ranging from 0.741 for Information to 0.848 for Content Creation. Data were collected electronically between May and July 2023, with written authorisation from school management, active parental consent and pupil assent obtained before participation, in line with the Declaration of Helsinki.

The sample was drawn through cluster sampling of intact sixth-grade classrooms, the final year of Spanish primary education. Boys made up 50.4 percent of participants and girls 49.6 percent, with 94.7 percent of the children younger than twelve. Most pupils, 68.5 percent, came from urban catchment areas, and 73.5 percent came from medium-to-high socio-economic contexts. Descriptive statistics and analyses of variance, computed with SPSS, were used to test whether digital competence differed according to gender and, crucially, according to how much supervision children reported receiving from parents or guardians.

The supervision picture was striking. Sixty percent of the children said they were always supervised when using their devices, 36.7 percent said they were supervised sometimes, and only 3.2 percent said they were never supervised. Nearly all of them, 99.2 percent, used their devices at home, and 98.9 percent had an internet connection there. Devices were overwhelmingly used in the family environment, reported by 86.8 percent of pupils, while 68.3 percent also used them with friends. The data confirm what earlier European studies had suggested: the home, not the school, remains the primary arena where young children learn to navigate digital technology.

Across the five DigComp areas, pupils reported a generally medium level of competence, with clear strengths and weaknesses. In the Information dimension, children scored well on finding information with search engines and selecting relevant results, but the trend turned negative when they were asked to compare different sources or judge whether what they found was reliable. Communication was the strongest area, with high marks for awareness of the risks of sharing information online and for safeguarding privacy. Safety also scored satisfactorily, with nearly two-thirds of children saying they protected their devices well. The weakest area was Content Creation, where pupils reported limited ability to produce presentations, audio files, videos or cloud-based documents, and where awareness of copyright was patchy. Problem solving revealed a telling deficit: children showed little initiative when technology simply stopped working.

The most provocative findings emerged when the researchers cross-referenced supervision with competence. In the Information and Problem Solving dimensions, pupils who were always supervised reflected more on the information they found online, scoring 3.18 on the study’s scale compared with 2.88 for those supervised only sometimes. Supervised children also better understood why teachers restrict technology use at school. But the pattern reversed in Communication: children who were never supervised interacted more through communication tools and were more adept at sharing files and content, suggesting that trial-and-error self-learning flourishes when adults step back. Unsupervised children also claimed greater knowledge of how to avoid cyberbullying, scoring 3.92 against 3.20 for always-supervised peers, though they were simultaneously more careless with privacy.

The authors interpret this apparent paradox through the lens of parental mediation theory, which has shifted from restrictive control towards models of digital co-responsibility. Supervision without genuine training in technology use, they caution, risks enclosing children in an overprotective bubble, leaving them unprepared when they eventually socialise and communicate more freely online. Conversely, unsupervised children appear to learn experimentally, solving everyday problems through personal trial and error, but at the cost of riskier privacy habits. The study also found no statistically reliable gender differences in digital competence, a null result consistent with recent international evidence from the OECD and the IEA’s ICILS assessment showing that gender gaps, where they exist, are small, domain-specific and highly dependent on school-level conditions.

The findings land in a context of documented urgency. According to the European Commission’s Digital Economy and Society Index, 36 percent of Spain’s population lacks basic digital skills, with minors from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds particularly affected, and the Commission projects that highly qualified workers will account for 43 percent of total labour demand by 2030. Spanish national statistics show that 67.6 percent of Andalusian children own mobile phones and 89.1 percent access the internet frequently. Yet education policy has largely focused on equipping schools with hardware while neglecting the training of pupils and, crucially, their families. Previous research in Norway, Kosovo and Russia has already shown that socio-economic circumstances, home resources and geographic factors predict children’s digital competence; this study adds the quality and consistency of parental supervision to that list of decisive variables.

The researchers conclude that family supervision does influence the development of digital competence in primary school children, but that supervision alone is not enough. Families, they argue, need specialised training to acquire the digital skills required to guide children effectively, particularly in the weakest domains of Content Creation and Information evaluation, where vulnerabilities to disinformation and unsafe practices concentrate. They recommend an upper-primary curriculum offering all pupils balanced opportunities in information handling, collaboration, computational thinking and critical evaluation, alongside school-supported, discussion-based co-use of technology at home. The team acknowledges that its results come from a single Spanish region and cannot be statistically generalised elsewhere, and it calls for longitudinal and mixed-methods research to test whether targeted classroom tasks and supervision routines can close the domain-specific gaps. For now, the message for parents is nuanced but clear: watching over a child’s screen time matters, but knowing what to do with that watchfulness matters even more.

Subject of Research: The influence of family supervision on the digital competence of primary education students across the five DigComp areas

Article Title: Family supervision and digital competence in primary education students

Article References: Ortiz-Colón, A. M., Rodríguez-Moreno, J., & Agreda-Montoro, M. (2025). Family supervision and digital competence in primary education students. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 14(1), Article 24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-025-00044-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-025-00044-x

Keywords: digital competence, family supervision, primary education, DigComp, parental mediation, ICT, children, online safety, digital literacy, Andalusia, content creation, problem solving

The core problem the study addresses is one of averages. Most previous analyses of technology and pollution rely on average-effect estimates, which assume that a variable’s influence on carbon intensity is uniform whether emissions are at their lowest or their highest. The authors argue that this assumption is untenable. FinTech, digitalization, ICT and green technology do not act homogeneously; their environmental consequences can differ significantly depending on the level of carbon intensity in a given period. An economy experiencing unusually high emissions may respond to digital investment very differently from one operating near its cleanest historical performance, and an average-effect model would blur precisely the distinctions policymakers need to understand.

To capture this heterogeneity, the team deployed an unusually rich methodological arsenal. Their central technique is Quantile on Quantile Regression (QQR), which estimates how different quantiles of each explanatory variable interact with different quantiles of carbon intensity, effectively mapping the relationship across the full joint distribution rather than at a single average point. They complement this with Multivariate Quantile on Quantile Regression (MQQR), which assesses the combined effect of the technological ecosystem as a whole, and with two time-frequency tools borrowed from signal processing: Wavelet Coherence (WC) and Wavelet Quantile Correlation (WQC). These wavelet methods allow the researchers to track how strongly the variables move together across short-, medium- and long-run periods throughout the 23-year sample, revealing dynamics that a fixed-coefficient regression would miss entirely.

The results are striking in their asymmetry. At lower quantiles of carbon intensity—periods when emissions were relatively low—FinTech exhibits weaker and statistically insignificant effects on carbon intensity. In other words, digital finance does not appear to be a reliable emissions-reduction tool when the economy is already running clean. This finding complicates the popular narrative that fintech innovation automatically greets environmental goals; its leverage appears conditional rather than constant. For regulators, the implication is that promoting FinTech as a climate instrument requires attention to the prevailing emission regime, not just to the volume of digital financial activity.

Digitalization tells a clearer story. Its effect on carbon intensity is mostly negative, and most pronounced at high emission quantiles—precisely where reductions matter most for climate outcomes. When China’s carbon intensity was at its dirtiest, the expansion of digital processes, automation and data-driven efficiency delivered some of its strongest curbing effects. This makes intuitive technical sense: digitalization substitutes information flows for material ones, optimizes logistics, reduces transaction frictions and enables real-time monitoring of energy use, and these mechanisms bite hardest when inefficiency and emissions are at their peak. Digitalization, the study suggests, is a technology whose climate dividend scales with the size of the problem it confronts.

ICT proves the wildcard. Unlike the other variables, information and communication technology exhibits a nonlinear and more complex pattern across quantiles of carbon intensity. Its effect flips and shifts in strength depending on where in the distribution the economy sits, reflecting what environmental economists have long described as a double-edged dynamic. ICT can compress carbon intensity by enabling dematerialization and smarter infrastructure, yet it also expands the electricity-hungry footprint of networks, servers and devices. The study’s quantile-based evidence shows that neither a uniformly optimistic nor a uniformly pessimistic reading of ICT is defensible; its environmental role depends on the emission context in which it operates.

The clearest winner is green technology. Across almost all quantiles of carbon intensity, Gtech shows the strongest and most stable negative effect of any explanatory variable in the model. Green technology patents and innovations—covering renewable energy, energy efficiency and pollution control—consistently reduce emissions per unit of output regardless of whether the economy is running clean or dirty. This stability is the crucial technical distinction: while FinTech’s effect fades at low emission levels and ICT’s effect oscillates, green technology behaves like a dependable structural reducer of carbon intensity. For policymakers deciding where to concentrate research funding and industrial policy, that consistency is a powerful argument.

Perhaps the most consequential finding comes from the multivariate analysis. The MQQR results reveal that the overall effect of the technological ecosystem—FinTech, digitalization, ICT and green technology acting together—is more emission-reducing than the sum of the individual impacts estimated by conventional QQR. The technologies reinforce one another: digital infrastructure amplifies the diffusion of green patents, fintech channels capital into clean innovation, and ICT enables the monitoring and optimization that make both effective. This complementarity means that treating these tools as separate policy levers understates their potential. An integrated technological strategy, in which digital and financial innovation are designed to accelerate green technology deployment, delivers a greater climate payoff than the same investments made in isolation.

The wavelet analysis adds the temporal dimension that annual averages conceal. By examining coherence across short-, medium- and long-run periods for the full sample, the study shows that the relationships among these technologies and carbon intensity are not static over the two decades examined. China’s economic transformation—from WTO accession in 2001 through its industrial supercycle to its dual-circulation digital era—means that the technology-emission nexus itself evolved, with structural breaks detected in the data confirming regime changes along the way. Time-frequency methods of this kind are increasingly seen as essential in energy economics, because policy prescriptions drawn from one era may simply not transfer to another.

The study’s implications align explicitly with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 7 on affordable and clean energy, SDG 9 on industry, innovation and infrastructure, SDG 12 on responsible consumption and production, and SDG 13 on climate action. For a country that produces roughly a third of global carbon emissions while simultaneously leading the world in renewable energy capacity, electric vehicle manufacturing and digital payments, understanding which technologies actually bend the carbon-intensity curve—and under what conditions—is a question of global significance. The authors’ evidence underscores the significance of FinTech, digitalization, ICT and green technology in supporting the transition to energy-efficient and low-carbon economic systems in China. The broader lesson for the international community is methodological as much as substantive: in a world of nonlinear, state-dependent environmental dynamics, the era of single-coefficient answers is over, and quantile-aware, time-aware analysis is becoming the standard against which credible climate-economics research will be judged.

Subject of Research: The asymmetric effects of FinTech, digitalization, ICT and green technology on carbon intensity in China.

Article Title: Decoding carbon intensity in China through FinTech, digitalization, and green technology

Article References: Tariq, A., Khan, N., Shah, S. Z. A., & Rizwan, M. F. (2026). Decoding carbon intensity in China through FinTech, digitalization, and green technology. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04587-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04587-7

Keywords: carbon intensity, China, FinTech, digitalization, ICT, green technology, quantile on quantile regression, wavelet coherence, climate policy, SDG 13, energy transition, emissions

The study, published in Discover Mental Health, was conducted by Md Salek Miah and Md Jamal Uddin of the Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Public Health Research Team in the Department of Statistics at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology in Sylhet, Bangladesh. The researchers drew on data from the 2022 Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey, one of the most methodologically rigorous household surveys conducted in the developing world. Their analytical sample included 18,987 ever-married women between the ages of 15 and 49 years, a population chosen because reproductive-age women in Bangladesh face well-documented pressures ranging from early marriage and childbearing to intimate partner violence, all of which intersect with mental health. By anchoring their analysis in a survey of this scale and quality, the authors were able to move beyond the small convenience samples that dominate the digital mental health literature.

Methodologically, the study is notable for its use of two validated clinical screening instruments. Symptoms of depression were measured with the nine-item Patient Health Questionnaire, widely regarded as a reliable and feasible tool for population-based screening, while anxiety symptoms were captured with the seven-item Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale. Both instruments categorize respondents according to symptom severity, allowing the researchers to identify women whose scores crossed clinically meaningful thresholds. Digital connectivity was operationalized along three distinct dimensions: internet use, broader information and communication technology usage, and ownership of ICT devices such as mobile phones. This distinction matters, the authors argue, because access to technology is not a single variable but a bundle of exposures, and different forms of access may carry different psychological implications for women navigating constrained social environments.

The headline prevalence figures provide important context for interpreting the associations. Overall, 4.8 percent of the women surveyed showed symptoms of depression, while 4.1 percent exhibited symptoms of anxiety. These population-level rates appear modest compared with high-income countries, but the researchers emphasize that the burden is far from evenly distributed. To estimate the relationship between digital connectivity and mental health symptoms, the team fitted survey-weighted multivariable logistic regression models, adjusting for potential confounding factors and checking for multicollinearity using variance inflation factors. Survey weighting ensured that the estimates reflected the national population rather than the composition of the sample, and stratified analyses by place of residence allowed rural and urban patterns to be compared directly.

The results revealed striking geographic heterogeneity. Among rural women, ICT use was significantly associated with higher odds of depression symptoms, with an adjusted odds ratio of 1.38 and a 95 percent confidence interval of 1.12 to 1.69. In plain terms, rural women who engaged with information and communication technology were roughly 38 percent more likely to screen positive for depression than comparable rural women who did not, after accounting for other measured factors. The confidence interval excludes the null value, indicating a statistically robust association, though the cross-sectional design means the direction of causality cannot be established. It is equally plausible that women experiencing depressive symptoms turn to technology in different ways than women without symptoms, or that unmeasured social circumstances drive both technology use and mental distress.

In urban Bangladesh, the pattern shifted from use to ownership. Among city-dwelling women, higher ICT ownership was associated with depression symptoms, with an adjusted odds ratio of 1.81 and a confidence interval of 1.01 to 3.25, and with anxiety symptoms, with an adjusted odds ratio of 2.11 and a confidence interval of 1.14 to 3.92. Urban women who owned more digital devices thus faced roughly twice the odds of anxiety symptoms compared with their peers. The authors suggest that in urban environments, where connectivity is nearly universal, the mere fact of device ownership may mark deeper stratification in social comparison, economic pressure, or exposure to online stressors. In rural areas, by contrast, where connectivity remains a scarcer resource, the act of using technology itself may differentiate women in ways that correlate with psychological strain.

Perhaps the most visually compelling aspect of the study is its spatial analysis at the divisional level. Bangladesh is divided into eight administrative divisions, and the researchers found that mental health burdens clustered in specific regions. The digitally connected divisions of Dhaka, Chattogram, Sylhet, and Barishal showed high mental health burden, while Rangpur stood out as a region with both low digital access and a lower mental health burden. Rajshahi also displayed lower digital access and distinct mental health patterns. This inverse geography, in which the most connected parts of the country carry the heaviest psychological load, adds a provocative dimension to debates about digital development. The authors argue that these patterns reveal significant rural-urban and geographic inequities and underscore the need for region-specific, equity-oriented digital mental health interventions rather than one-size-fits-all national policies.

The findings arrive at a moment when global health policy is increasingly framing digital access as a development goal in its own right. The researchers connect their work to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 3 on health and well-being, and argue that combining mental health progress with gender-sensitive and geographically targeted digital strategies is essential for advancing women’s mental well-being. Their analysis situates digital access within broader negotiations of women’s health, noting that in Bangladesh, as in much of South Asia, women’s technology use is mediated by household power dynamics, education, income, and, in some contexts, exposure to intimate partner violence. A woman’s phone can be a lifeline, a surveillance tool wielded against her, or both at once, and population surveys can only partially disentangle these dynamics.

Several limitations temper the conclusions, and the authors are appropriately measured in their framing. The data are cross-sectional, so associations cannot be interpreted as causal effects; women with depression or anxiety may use or own technology differently because of their symptoms rather than the reverse. The BDHS instruments capture symptoms through screening questionnaires rather than clinical diagnosis, and the study population was restricted to ever-married women, leaving unmarried women outside the analytical frame. Residual confounding by socioeconomic status, marital quality, and exposure to violence cannot be excluded. Nevertheless, the sheer sample size, the national representativeness, the use of validated screening tools, and the explicit rural-urban stratification make this study a valuable benchmark for South Asian digital mental health research, a field that has long been dominated by evidence from wealthier nations.

For policymakers in Bangladesh and beyond, the message is not that connectivity harms women, but that the mental health implications of digital life are unevenly distributed across geography, gender, and social position. As governments invest in broadband expansion and smartphone adoption accelerates, the authors contend that digital strategies must be designed with women’s specific vulnerabilities and contexts in mind. The paradox highlighted by this research, that the most digitally saturated divisions of Bangladesh show the greatest mental health burden while the least connected regions show less, should serve as a caution against assuming that technological progress automatically translates into psychological well-being. What is needed, the study concludes, is a new generation of interventions that treat digital access as one strand within the wider fabric of women’s health, equity, and social change.

Subject of Research: Digital connectivity and mental health symptoms among ever-married women in Bangladesh

Article Title: Digital connectivity and mental health symptoms among women in Bangladesh: a rural–urban perspective

Article References: Miah, M. S., & Uddin, M. J. (2026). Digital connectivity and mental health symptoms among women in Bangladesh: a rural–urban perspective. Discover Mental Health. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44192-026-00591-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44192-026-00591-5

Keywords: digital connectivity, mental health, Bangladesh, depression, anxiety, women's health, ICT, rural-urban disparities, spatial inequality, BDHS 2022, public health, SDG 3