Social media plays a huge role in the life of high school and college kids. Many of us can’t even imagine our lives without the use of Facebook, Instagram and twitter and it is somewhat pathetic. I am constantly on social media, I’m on it before bed and it’s probably the first thing I check when I wake up in the morning. Curious as to what effects it had on me, I came across an article that said Facebook lowers grades by 20%, compared to those who do not use it. I never thought about this before, could it be true?

The study was conducted by Paul A. Kirschnera and Aryn C. Karpinskib. Paul is a psychologist from the Center for Learning Sciences and Technologies in the Netherlands and Aryn a professor at Ohio State. According to the article, they studied 219 college students (University not mentioned), the participants ranged in age from 19 to 54, so I’m assuming graduate students were involved also. After analyzing the results, they were able to conclude that the students who used Facebook had an average GPA of 3.06, while non Facebook users has an average of 3.82.

The experiment mentioned was very vague, we don’t know how it was conducted or how they gathered their results. Only 219 students were tested, this may have just been the case at the specific University they were at. The students with lower GPA’s could just in fact be less intelligent then those with higher GPA’s, and it not have anything to do with Facebook at all. Maybe it is due to reverse causation, and those that are less intelligent use Facebook more often than those with greater intelligence. Do the students just need to have a Facebook, or do they need to use it frequently. Did the participants who used Facebook more have lower GPA’s than those who had one but barely used it? We do not know how long the participants were studied for, maybe they just had a bad semester. We cannot just assume that Facebook is the reason for the lower GPA, there are other factors that can lead to it such as lack of studying. If Facebook is the absolute cause, it can maybe be due to the fact that us young people are the Queens of double tasking. Doing homework online and switching back and forth between writing a paper and checking what’s going on on Facebook. Maybe it is the distraction that causes that lower grades and not just Facebook, perhaps a game tab could be open instead and they would be just as distracted from their work.

We need a lot more information on the study to conclude that the lower GPA’s are due to Facebook. If I were to do the experiment, I would probably take a larger sample size from various Universities. I would give them some sort of IQ test to see the range of intelligence of my participants. Then, I would have them fill out a questionnaire that allowed me to understand their Facebook usage. With permission, I would maybe even get access to their computers to track when they worked on assignments and how long it took. I would record my results and see if Facebook and other distractions played a role on their GPA. I do believe that Facebook can play a role in lowering GPA, but I feel like it is distractions as a whole that do this. When completing work we should try and blur out distractions, although it is defiantly hard when we are bored. There are studies to show that less work gets done containing more mistakes when we multi task. After analyzing this study, I would not blame the lower GPA on Facebook itself but a compiling of distractions, a cell phone, a TV, anything. The article is not saying get rid of your Facebook, but instead suggesting that it could be negatively having an effect on your grades. So maybe keep the usage to a minimum and see if this helps get work done.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39038581/ns/technology_and_science-back_to_school/t/facebook-use-can-lower-grades-percent-study-says/#.VIFFxEup3wI