If your kids’ grades are not improving but falling tremendously, maybe you should consider having them to spend lesser time on the world’s most popular platform – Facebook. According to a new study conducted by Ohio State University, it says that those students who use Facebook frequently will tend to spend less time on their schoolwork, hence resulting in lower grades. It seems that these young kids aren’t admitting the truth as the study noted that more than three-quarters of Facebook users claimed that their use of the social networking site didn’t interfere with their studies. This two statements are so contradicting.
“We can’t say that use of Facebook leads to lower grades and less studying – but we did find a relationship there,” said Aryn Karpinski, co-author of the study and a doctoral student in education at Ohio State University. Additional information includes Facebook users had GPAs a full grade lower than non-users. Facebook users also studied on average one to five hours a week, compared to 11 to 15 hours for non-users.
Surveying 219 students at Ohio State, including 102 undergraduate students and 117 graduate students, 148 of the participants commented that they had a Facebook account. Also, the study found that 85 percent of undergraduates were Facebook users, while only 52 percent of graduate students had accounts. Science, technology, engineering, math (STEM) and business majors were more likely to use Facebook than were students majoring in the humanities and social sciences.
Well, the irony with the result of this study is that Mark Zukerberg and his fellow computer science major students founded Facebook while he was a student at Harvard University and it was meant for students to connect and interact with one another online. On the other hand, the study claimed that using Facebook are bad for the brain, especially for kids. Probably the main reason is because it’s too addictive due to its wonderful and interesting features such as “poking” their friends, posting photos and even playing games on the social platform.
Currently, there are 200 million users worldwide who have signed up for Facebook and the bulk comes from United States. The main demographic still lies within the 30+ age group and kids under 18 doesn’t make up a huge percentage of the entire population.