Facebook Users Spend Less Time Studying: Report
Posted April 14, 2009 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Researchers in the US have found that students who spend a lot of time online do so at the expense of their studies.
Social networking sites like Facebook are hugely popular among the school-age crowd, at academic levels from elementary to post-secondary.
At Ohio State University, investigators tried to determine whether there could be a relationship between their time on the site and their academic achievement.
Researchers found that students with a profile on Facebook have lower grade point averages compared to those not on the site, and they also spent less time studying.
Facebook users surveyed had GPAs between 3.0 and 3.5, while non-users were around half a point higher, with GPAs between 3.5 and 4.0.
Facebook users spent one-to-five hours a week studying, while non-users cracked the books for 11 to 15 hours a week.
The most interesting part is that students didn’t think it affected them. When asked if Facebook had an impact on their academic performance, 79 per cent of Facebook users said it didn’t.
But researchers couldn’t say if Facebook caused the drop in performance.
Facebook is displayed on a laptop screen on March 25, 2009 in London, England. Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.
