As long as there have been colleges, there have been ways for college students to distract themselves from studying. These days most of the blame for this distraction is directed toward social media, especially Facebook.
“I was struck very early on by how, in the media, Facebook was a negative thing,” says Reynol Junco, a social media scholar who teaches at Lock Haven University. “Among my students, I was noticing that some of them were using it for very positive things.”
So Junco studied about 1,800 undergraduate college students, their grade point averages, how much time they spent on Facebook and their activities on the social-networking site. He didn't expect to see any correlation between students' grades and their Facebook time. So he was surprised by some of the results: The students' grades were affected by their time on the site, but a bigger indicator was what they actually did. His study, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, showed that those who spent a lot of time posting status updates took a hit on their grades. But it actually helped students' grades if they primarily shared information and checked up on their friends.
He adds that college professors can use students' Facebook use to their advantage, since the site is more engaging than classroom software in place at many schools. A faculty member might set up Facebook pages for their courses and encourage students to post articles or videos related to class discussions, for example.
Source: Reynol Junco, Lock Haven University
Writer: Rebecca VanderMeulen