What happens inside ICT classrooms when it comes to girls?
Dr. Irina Dimitrova, Co-Founder & Chief Research Officer (CRO) at ProtoBuild Dynamics and contributor to two of our Connecting Women in Digital Thematic Working Groups, tried to answer this question in the webinar held on March 18th, 2026.
Her presentation introduced the Classroom Evidence Lab, an observational tool designed to generate real evidence from ICT classrooms as a start for a broader conversation about the persistent gap between policy ambition and daily teaching reality.
The gap between policy and the classroom
There has been an impressive European policy architecture around digital education and gender equality in recent years. From the Digital Education Action Plan to DigComp Edu, Council recommendations on digital skills to the Härnösand Declaration, the strategic direction is evident.
“From a policy perspective, we are covered, and the direction is clear. We know that increasing girls’ participation and progression in ICT and STEM is essential for Europe’s digital future.”
And yet, most European monitoring instruments are designed to track system-level performance: how many students study ICT, how many teachers receive digital training, how countries perform on skills indicators. What they rarely capture is what takes place during ICT lessons.
“The monitoring usually happens at the system level, but the actual learning happens somewhere else. It happens inside classrooms, in the daily interactions between teachers and students, and this is exactly the level where we often have the least evidence.”
Dimitrova called this the policy-to-classroom gap: the distance between strategies at the European or national level, and the classroom dynamics that shape whether those strategies become reality or quietly dissolve.
Participation, confidence, and progression
Girls, Dimitrova explained, do not disengage from ICT suddenly. The process is gradual with small, unnoticed patterns: who volunteers to use a device, who takes the technical role in group work, who feels comfortable presenting in front of the class.
“These dynamics often remain invisible unless teachers intentionally observe them.”
That is why the Classroom Evidence Lab focuses on participation, confidence, and progression.
Participation asks who is actively involved in learning and who steps aside.
Confidence examines how students perceive their own ability to work with digital tools (a dimension that research, including PISA data, suggests is critically important for girls, who frequently outperform boys in ICT yet report lower confidence in using technology publicly or experimentally).
Progression, finally, looks at whether students are moving towards greater engagement over time, beginning to see themselves in digital roles.
“Participation shows who is present. Confidence shows who feels capable. Progression shows who continues the journey.”
A five-step tool designed for real classrooms
The Classroom Evidence Lab has created a five-step cycle that teachers can realistically integrate into normal teaching practice, without additional research projects or external evaluators.
The cycle begins with a Student Confidence Survey, a gender-disaggregated, brief, anonymous questionnaire completed by students at the start and end of a term. It allows teachers to observe shifts in confidence over time and across different groups.
The second step is a Role Allocation Tracker, the highest-leverage component of the entire tool according to Dimitrova. During collaborative ICT activities, teachers record the roles students take, thus evaluating participation dynamics.
“If girls are consistently observers rather than operators, confidence gaps are predictable. And experience shapes identity, as Leadership starts in group work “
A Progression Snapshot tracking students’ evolving engagement with ICT learning, a Teacher Reflection form inviting educators to interpret the patterns they have observed, and a final summary report complete the cycle, creating a virtuous feedback loop in bettering the teacher’s behavior and attention to these critical details.
A central argument of the presentation was that the value of classroom-level evidence does not stop at the classroom door.
“When many schools generate small pieces of classroom evidence, this information can feed back into policy discussions. It provides something that large monitoring systems often lack: insight into real classroom dynamics.”
Dimitrova also addressed how the tool might complement existing instruments such as SELFIE, the European school reflection tool on digital capacity, and DigComp Edu. Rather than proposing entirely new frameworks, her suggestion was to introduce a gender-responsive lens as an add-on to tools schools already use: a small set of prompts about who feels confident using technology, who takes technical leadership, and whether digital policies are translating into inclusive practice.
A call for pilots and political will
Closing the session, Dimitrova was direct about what the next steps would look like. The Classroom Evidence Lab is a practically ready framework, requiring no financial investment to implement. What it needs is coordinated will: from ministries willing to adapt and distribute the guidance, from schools willing to pilot the full cycle, and from the broader ecosystem of educators and policymakers who care about closing the gap between written strategy and lived classroom experience.
“Perhaps the most important question for all of us working on digital inclusion is very simple: what happens inside the classroom tomorrow morning?”
