The effects of social media usage on attention, motivation, and academic performance

Abstract

Accessing social media is common and although concerns have been raised regarding the impact of social media on academic success, research in this area is sparse and inconsistent. Survey responses were collected from 659 undergraduate and graduate students to determine the relationship between social media usage and overall academic performance, as well as explore if this relationship is moderated by attention (regulation of time/study environment) and motivation (effort regulation). Both predictors, social media usage and attention, significantly predicted academic performance. Likewise, when motivation was considered as a predictor, it significantly predicted academic performance above and beyond social media usage. No moderation was found between the three variables. Implications of these relationships are discussed.

A student-centred digital technology approach: The relationship between intrinsic motivation, learning climate and academic achievement of physical education pre-service teachers

“…Ryan and Deci (2017) also postulated that the most autonomous forms of motivation, including intrinsic motivation, would lead to adaptive behaviour, cognitive and affective outcomes. Research also suggests that within the undergraduate student population in general, when integrating active learning and student-centred strategies in the teaching approaches, there is a consistent positive relationship between intrinsic motivation (Trevino and DeFreitas, 2014), self-efficacy (Sun et al, 2018) and academic achievement (Barton et al, 2018; Jeno et al, 2017).…”

Antecedents of Social Media Usage Status: Examination of Predictiveness of Digital Literacy, Academic Performance, and Fear of Missing Out Variables

“…However, even though concerns on negative effects of social media on academic success have been reported in the literature, yet there is not sufficient research on this subject. Moreover, there are contradictions between the results of the available research (Barton et al., 2018).…”

“…In the literature, different studies have been conducted with the purpose of examining the relation between usage of social media environments and academic success where contradictory findings have been reached (Abdulahi, Samadi, and Gharleghi, 2014; Alwagait, Shahzad, and Alim, 2015; Barton et al., 2018; Khairi and Ghani, 2019; Owusu‐Acheaw and Larson, 2015). While in some studies, a negative relation between the use of social media environments and academic success was indicated (Karpinski et al., 2013), in other studies, relation level was reported to be very weak.…”

“…In a study conducted by Barton et al. (2018), data were collected from undergraduate and postgraduate students in order to detect the relation between the usage of social media and academic performance and to research whether this relation is controlled by attention (regulation of time/study environment) and motivation (regulation of strenuousness). In this study, usage of social media together with attention and motivation predicted academic performance to an important extent.…”

Análisis de los factores tecnológicos sobre el rendimiento académico en una universidad pública en la Ciudad de México

“…Pues, la utilización de las TIC junto con una metodología activa de enseñanza-aprendizaje contribuyen a fomentar la formación universitaria (Castillo-Montes y Ramírez-Santana, 2020). Además de que existe una correlación positiva entre el rendimiento académico de los estudiantes y la frecuencia de uso de Facebook con fines educativos (Lambić, 2016), así como la atención y motivación de usar Facebook en la educación también ayuda en el rendimiento del alumno (Barton, Adams, Browne y Arrastia-Chisholm, 2018). Lo cual justifica también la investigación para comprobar si en México existe un efecto positivo del uso de Facebook en el rendimiento académico universitario, pese a los problemas de infraestructura que se tienen.…”