Abstract
With the rise of the internet wave in the twenty-first century, adolescents' internet usage patterns have become increasingly widespread and diverse, drawing growing attention to how these preferences influence subject-specific literacy development. Based on data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2022 in Hong Kong, China, this study focuses on three typical usage patterns-learning-oriented, social-oriented, and entertainment-oriented internet preferences-to examine their effects on secondary students' mathematical literacy and associated heterogeneous impacts. Employing propensity score matching and causal forest methods for empirical analysis, the findings reveal that: (1) Learning-oriented internet preferences have a small but statistically significant positive effect on mathematical literacy; (2) Social-oriented and entertainment-oriented internet preferences exhibit significant negative effects on mathematical literacy; (3) Heterogeneity analysis indicates that learning-oriented preferences provide stronger benefits for "disadvantaged" students (those with lower family socioeconomic status and insufficient family support); (4) Social-oriented and entertainment-oriented preferences demonstrate more pronounced negative effects on "advantaged" students (those with higher family socioeconomic status and stronger family support and teacher support). These results offer new empirical evidence for understanding the relationship between internet usage preferences and mathematical literacy, with important implications for designing targeted educational interventions.