Facebook Users -- and Research -- Need Further Study
Posted by Celia Walter | 12 Jun, 2009Good News: The Social-Networking Site Likely Doesn't Cause Poor Grades.
Bad News: Students Achieve Them on Their Own
College students who have defriended Facebook after news broke of a link between the social-network site and lower grades, or younger users whose parents have made them, can rest easy. The grade numbers arise from a study that is preliminary -- so much so that it cries out for further study even more than many other pilot experiments.
Facebook may well distract and delay but there is far from enough numerical evidence to support that claim, notwithstanding hundreds of international headlines to the contrary.
These latest headlines originated with a survey last year of 219 Ohio State University undergraduates and graduate students. The results were presented at the American Educational Research Association meeting in San Diego last Thursday.
Those students who said they used Facebook also said they had lower grades than those who don't use the social-networking site for such activities as updating their status and tracking friends. The Facebook users' achievements were lighter by about 0.5 grade-point-average points and 10 hours of weekly study, respectively.
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The study triggered frightening headlines such as, "Study finds Facebook goofing hurts grades," "Study says Facebook can impact studies" and "Research finds the website is damaging students' academic performance."
However, researchers Aryn Karpinski, a doctoral student in education at Ohio State, and Adam Duberstein, an academic adviser at Ohio Dominican University, didn't examine the influence of Facebook on grades. Facebook may be a symptom of a big procrastination habit, not a cause. Should Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg pull the plug, chronic users of his site may just procrastinate elsewhere...[More]
From The Wall Street Journal.