Los Efectos De Facebook En Las Calificaciones De Los Estudiantes Universitarios

Abstract

There is much speculation and interest in the effect of the time spent on social media sites and school performance among college students. Social media has become an integral component of most College students. The sample for this study consisted of 27 College students enrolled in a single Research and Methods class at California State University Sacramento. Most of these studentswere Child Development majors. There have been a few studies done, which have attempted to examine the relationship between Grade Point Average (GPA) and time spent on social media sites (especially Facebook and twitter). The studies, however, have been limited by the measures employed, the sampling designs and failure to include prior academic ability as a control variable. For instance, someof those previous studies have used non-continuous measures of the time the students spent on Facebook and self-reported GPA. This study attempts to provide more insight into the possible negative effect on College performance and the use of social media sites by students.
The topic of this study was to determine if the use of social media had a negative effect on college students’ GPA. Thistopic is relevant to study due to the popularity of social media use among college students. It is important to learn more about this because there is popular interest in how Social Media use affects learning and overall school performance among college students. The hypothesis being tested was time spent on Texting, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Youtube, Instagram, Flickr, Soompi, andStumbleUpon, by the students as significant, as well as strongly related negatively to GPA. To give an example, some students multitask and by simultaneous use of any combination of Texting, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Youtube, Instagram, Flickr, Soompi, and StumbleUpon, at once. It was also discovered that some students, all the participants self-reported accessing Social Media duringclass. It is important to study this topic because if a true relationship exists between college GPA and social media use. Therefore, students can have quantitative background information to help them make better decisions when it comes to spending their time wisely while attending college. It has been determined in other studies on this subject that about 80 percent of College students usesocial media sites. For this study, out of 27 participants, 3 reported that they did not access social media sites at all. This is only 11 percent. There are many available social media sites, however, it was evident through this study that Facebook, twitter, e-mail, and internet browsing were the most popular used among the population studied.

Literature Review
Based on the study performedby Kirschner and Karpinski (2010), titled Facebook and academic performance; it was determined that while time spent on Facebook affected grades negatively, the frequency of checking status did not influence in a negative way how much time students spend preparing for a class. The analysis of the data was performed through descriptive statistics. The researchers believed that it would be a goodidea for instructors to incorporate the use of Facebook as a part of their courses. Since students spent time engaging in this social media, they believed that it would be a good idea to incorporate this social media as a tool for students. By having facebook as a platform to share course ideas, information, resources and files it was believed might make students perform better academically.Based on the study findings, the hypotheses tested were confirmed. It was found that those college students who have an active Facebook account have lower GPAs than those students who did not have a Facebook account. The study concluded that when facebook was used for socializing purposes the effect was negative; versus when it was used for academic purposes. The general conclusions drawn from...