Background and Context The increasingly widespread use of social media to expand one's social connections is a relatively new but important phenomenon that has implications for teaching, learning, and teachers’ professional knowledge and development in the 21st century. Educational research in this area is expanding, but further investigation is necessary to better determine how to best support teachers in their professional development, collaboration, and classroom teaching. Prior literature reviews have focused extensively on higher education settings or particular platforms or platform types (e.g., Facebook, microblogging). This article provides needed insights into K–12 settings and encompasses work from a variety of social media types. We describe a systematic review of more than a decade of educational research from various countries to present the state of the field in K–12 teachers’ use of social media for teaching and professional learning across various platforms. Research Questions To define social media's potentially beneficial roles in teaching and learning, we must first take an in-depth look at teachers’ current social media practices. Toward this end, we approached our review with the following research question: How are social media perceived and used by K–12 teachers for their teaching or professional learning, and with what impacts on teachers’ practices? Research Design Guided by Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) established standards for rigor and quality in systematic literature reviews, this article reviews empirical research to examine how social media are perceived and used by K–12 teachers with what impacts on teachers’ practices. Findings We find that social media features offer several benefits for helping teachers fulfill their goals for classroom teaching, including enhancing student engagement, community connections, and teacher–student interactions, but these affordances come with challenges that must be navigated. The literature also suggests that social media features provide benefits for teachers’ professional learning within both formal professional development programs and informal learning networks. Conclusions Implications of this literature review for future research and the design of educational practices are discussed in the final section. Among our conclusions are calls for more data triangulation between teachers’ and students’ learning and experiences on social media, more attention to teachers’ observational behaviors on social media, and further exploration of how social media facilitates interplay between teachers’ formal and informal learning.

This study examined multiple measures of written expression as predictors of narrative writing performance for 362 students in grades 4 through 6. Each student wrote a fictional narrative in response to a title prompt that was evaluated using a levels of language framework targeting productivity, accuracy, and complexity at the word, sentence, and discourse levels. Graderelated differences were found for all of the word-level and most of the discourse-level variables examined, but for only one sentence-level variable (punctuation accuracy). The discourse-level variables of text productivity, narrativity, and process use, the sentence-level variables of grammatical correctness and punctuation accuracy, and the word-level variables of spelling/capitalization accuracy, lexical productivity, and handwriting style were significant predictors of narrative quality. Most of the same variables that predicted story quality differentiated good and poor narrative writers, except punctuation accuracy and narrativity, and variables associated with word and sentence complexity also helped distinguish narrative writing ability. The findings imply that a combination of indices from across all levels of language production are most useful for differentiating writers and their writing. The authors suggest researchers and educators consider levels of

This study examined multiple measures of written expression as predictors of narrative writing performance for 362 student in grades four through six. Each student wrote a fictional narrative in response to a title prompt that was evaluated using a levels of language framework targeting productivity, accuracy, and complexity at the word-, sentence-, and discourse- levels. Grade differences were found for all of the word-level variables examined and most of the discourse-level variables, but only one sentence-level variable (punctuation accuracy). The discourse-level variables of text productivity, narrativity, and process use, the sentence-level variables of grammatical correctness and punctuation accuracy, and the word-level variables of spelling/ capitalization accuracy, lexical productivity, and handwriting style were significant predictors of narrative quality. Most of the same variables that predicted story quality differentiated good and poor narrative writers, except punctuation accuracy and narrativity, and variables associated with word and sentence complexity also helped distinguish narrative writing ability.

Social media has attracted considerable scholarly interest. Previous research has demonstrated the need for a more comprehensive overview of social media research across diverse disciplines. However, there is a lack of research that identifies the scope of social media integration across educational settings and how it relates to research in other academic disciplines. Harnessing the search terms of previous literature reviews, this study collected data on 80,267 articles from the Web of Science Core Collection database using search terms that were based on previous literature reviews. The data were analyzed using a combination of co-citation and bibliometric analyses via a mixed-methods approach. Our results show that there has been a constant increase in the number of publications concerned with social media, both as a transversal topic and within the educational sector. We are also able to show a range of topical domains in which the vast majority of research on social media is conducted. Our findings have practical implications for scholars and practitioners alike. Scholars can benefit from these types of analyses to identify authors and topic clusters that might otherwise have been unrecognized. Similarly, practitioners can benefit from this overview of the current “state-of-the-art” on social media.

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