Use Facebook While Studying, Get Lower Grades

Students should think twice before logging into Facebook or sending text messages during study time, suggests a study to be published in the journal Computers & Education.
The study — which controlled for demographics, high school GPA, internet skills and amount of study time — asked 1,624 students at a four-year university about their multitasking habits.
The study included questions about how often students IM, email, search and talk during study time, but only Facebook and texting ultimately correlated with a lower GPA. There was no relationship between grades and using other technologies while studying.
Scientists already know that the brain isn’t capable of successful multitasking. “Human information processing is insufficient for attending to multiple input streams and for performing simultaneous tasks,” write the study’s authors Reynol Junco and Shelia R. Cotton.
Previous studies have determined, for instance, that driving while talking on a cell phone can have more of an impact on driving performance than alcohol does. Even simply walking and talking on the phone at the same time can throw our brain off of its game.
In other words, one would think that any multitasking during study time — not just using Facebook and texting — would have a negative impact on grades.
Junco suggests the difference might have something to do with how students are using different technologies. Students may be more likely to email professors and search out of academic curiosity than to socialize through email or search, while they’re unlikely to text message their teaching assistants for homework help.
“It could be that students with lower grades just happen to do more Facebook and texting,” Junco tells Mashable. “But I think this study in the context of other research does seem to show that it is about what they’re doing while they study and not the other way around.”
On average, students in the study sent 97 text messages and spent 101 minutes on Facebook every day. Junco doesn’t think that they’ll leave either technology behind, but in his own classes at Lock Haven University he encourages students to think about how they use them.
“What I tell them is, ‘look, you’re going to sit down to study anyway,” he says. “You might as well make it the most efficient use of your time.’”

How Well Are Schools Using Social Media ? [Infographic]

Is social media a distraction for students or an integrated part of college life? This infographic shows how schools have joined their students on sites like Facebook and Twitter to make college campuses even more social.
The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth conducted a Social Media Adoption study to see how social media is used in higher education. Not surprisingly, one hundred percent of the colleges and universities studied were using social media in some form.
The most common tool used was Facebook, which is used by 98 percent of the schools that participated in the study. The other tools used were LinkedIn, Twitter, blogs and message boards. The study, which lasted three school years between 2008 and 2011, showed some especially large growth rates for Twitter and LinkedIn in the last year.
LinkedIn recently enhanced its student profiles to include organizations, projects, awards, test scores and courses taken to make that first job out of college more attainable. Twitter users reported that professors used the microblogging site to make announcements about class schedules and tests.
Professional networking, outreach to current and potential students, and school pride were among the reasons listed for engaging in social media.  The Harvard University Facebook page, for example, includes articles from the Harvard Gazette, an ad for the “Tour Harvard Yard” mobile app, and pictures of life on campus in a folder titled, “As Seen at Harvard.” The posts drew comments from many hopeful applicants, as well as a few students.
The most social schools were John Hopkins University, University of Notre Dame, Ohio State University, Columbia University in the City of New York, and of course Harvard University, which was the school Mark Zuckerberg was attending when he created Facebook. None of these schools made Princeton Review’s list of top party schools in 2012, so the party must have moved online.
The infographic comes from Online Universities and includes some of the do’s and don’ts of social media at school. Take a look.