A study from Ohio State University has found that college students who use Facebook generally spend less time studying for classes, which potentially contributes to those students earning lower grades.
According to InformationWeek, eight in ten students who participated in the study said that their use of this popular social networking site does not interfere with their studies. However, the findings of the study say otherwise, with the researches having studied 219 students at OSU. Of those 219, 102 were undergraduates and 117 were graduate students.
Of the undergrads, 85 percent said that they were Facebook users, while 52 percent of the graduates said that they are Facebook users, adding up to a total of 148 students of the 219 that were on Facebook.
The data shows that college-aged Facebook users spend an average of one to five hours a week studying, whereas nonusers studied for 11 to 15 hours per week. This discrepancy between the hours spent studying may explain why the users generally have GPAs between 3.0 and 3.5, whereas nonusers have GPAs between 3.5 and 4.0.
“We can’t say that use of Facebook leads to lower grades and less studying, but we did find a relationship there,” Aryn Karpinski, co-author of the study and a doctoral candidate at OSU, said in a statement.
The study also found that students majoring in business, engineering, math, science, and technology are more likely to use Facebook than those who major in the humanities or social sciences. According to Karpinski, one explanation for this finding is that the first group spend more time on the Internet in order to complete their school work.
Karpinski’s study found that students who spend more time on paid jobs are also less likely to use Facebook than those who spend their time on campus on extracurricular activities.
However, Karpinski did not find any relationships between different genders or racial/ethnic groups and their use of Facebook. But the data did show that younger students are more likely to use Facebook. Karpinski’s study is unique in that it was the first of its kind to research the link between use of social networking sites and students’ academic performance. Still, Karpinski said that the data does not conclude that Facebook use lowers grades.
“There may be other factors involved, such as personality traits, that link Facebook use and lower grades,” she said in her study. “It may be that if it wasn’t for Facebook, some students would still find other ways to avoid studying, and would still get lower grades.
“But perhaps the lower GPAs could actually be because students are spending too much time socializing online.”
Karpinski concluded by saying that it’s important that colleges know the impact of networking sites on students, since they are very popular,
Facebook signed up its 200 millionth user last month, the site said. According to ComScore, Facebook’s rival, MySpace currently has about 160 million users.
“For me, I think Facebook is a huge distraction,” Karpinski said to Research News adding that she does not have an account.
Karpinski and Adam Duerstein of Ohio Dominican University, the co-author, are to present their findings on Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association in San Diego.
Our Take:
“Less Facebook, more Honors,” my professor wrote to me today, regarding my dropping performance in developing research for my Honors thesis. She too has a Facebook account and is probably well aware that I’ve been logging in more time browsing friends’ photo albums and taking meaningless quizzes these past couple months.
My grades dropped last quarter, and I could see a little bit of where Facebook use comes in. However, like Karpinski said, it’s not the only cause. The television and even extracurricular activities hold plenty of distractions.
It is first really interesting that participants who spend more time with their jobs use less. Does this mean that they have higher GPAs than those who spend more time in extracurricular activities, who are more likely to use Facebook?
I think this research is particularly important in today’s world, where Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sites are a major part of college students’ lives, generally. It would be great if this was repeated in a larger scale, with more participants and more in-depth questions.
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