Can Facebook lower your academic performance?
13 April 2013 8:00 AM IST
Scientists have reported that rampant use of social networking, texting and chatting on mobile phone can result in lower grades and poor performance of students, says a study.
The widespread use of media among college students, from texting, chatting on mobile phones to posting status updates on Facebook, may be affecting their academic performance, say researchers at the Miriam Hospital’s Centres for Behavioural and Preventive Medicine in the US.
The study showed that freshmen women spend nearly half their day - 12 hours - engaged in some form of media use, particularly texting, music, the internet and social networking.
Researchers found media use, in general, was associated with lower grade point averages (GPAs) and other negative academic outcomes. However, there were two exceptions: newspaper reading and listening to music were actually linked to a positive academic performance.
The findings, reported online by the Journal Emerging Adulthood, offer some new insight into media use in early adulthood, a time when many young people are living independently for the first time and have significant freedom from parental monitoring, reports Science Daily.
‘We found women who spend more time using some forms of media report fewer academic behaviours, such as completing homework and attending class, lower academic confidence and more problems affecting their school work, like lack of sleep and substance use,’ said lead author Jennifer L. Walsh from the Miriam Hospital’s Centres for Behavioural and Preventive Medicine.
Walsh added that the study was the first to record media effects on academic outcomes.
SOUTH AFRICAN WRITER COETZEE RAILS AGAINST CENSORSHIP
South African-born Nobel literature laureate JM Coetzee offered an impassioned critique of censorship during a seminar at the Universidad Central de Bogota. Drawing from the themes of his 1996 book, ‘Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship’, the famously reticent 73-year-old author recounted personal experiences with censorship in apartheid South Africa. Though his novels In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Life & Times of Michael K (1983) were all critical of apartheid, government censors left them untouched because he was a white, middle-class intellectual who did not write ‘for mass consumption’, Coetzee said. The writer recounted how he came to learn that some of the members of the ‘anonymous committee of censors’ were in fact respected intellectuals of society.
The widespread use of media among college students, from texting, chatting on mobile phones to posting status updates on Facebook, may be affecting their academic performance, say researchers at the Miriam Hospital’s Centres for Behavioural and Preventive Medicine in the US.
The study showed that freshmen women spend nearly half their day - 12 hours - engaged in some form of media use, particularly texting, music, the internet and social networking.
Researchers found media use, in general, was associated with lower grade point averages (GPAs) and other negative academic outcomes. However, there were two exceptions: newspaper reading and listening to music were actually linked to a positive academic performance.
The findings, reported online by the Journal Emerging Adulthood, offer some new insight into media use in early adulthood, a time when many young people are living independently for the first time and have significant freedom from parental monitoring, reports Science Daily.
‘We found women who spend more time using some forms of media report fewer academic behaviours, such as completing homework and attending class, lower academic confidence and more problems affecting their school work, like lack of sleep and substance use,’ said lead author Jennifer L. Walsh from the Miriam Hospital’s Centres for Behavioural and Preventive Medicine.
Walsh added that the study was the first to record media effects on academic outcomes.
SOUTH AFRICAN WRITER COETZEE RAILS AGAINST CENSORSHIP
South African-born Nobel literature laureate JM Coetzee offered an impassioned critique of censorship during a seminar at the Universidad Central de Bogota. Drawing from the themes of his 1996 book, ‘Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship’, the famously reticent 73-year-old author recounted personal experiences with censorship in apartheid South Africa. Though his novels In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Life & Times of Michael K (1983) were all critical of apartheid, government censors left them untouched because he was a white, middle-class intellectual who did not write ‘for mass consumption’, Coetzee said. The writer recounted how he came to learn that some of the members of the ‘anonymous committee of censors’ were in fact respected intellectuals of society.
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