Well, that's not exactly what a new study found. But it did connect some dots between the use of Facebook and academic performance, and some folks are paying attention to the results.
According to the study by doctoral candidate Aryn Karpinski of Ohio State University and her co-author Adam Duberstein of Ohio Dominican University, college students who use the 200 million-member social network have significantly lower grade-point averages (GPAs) than those who do not.
This week, Time magazine reported on the study, which was a relatively small, exploratory study with just 219 undergraduate and graduate students surveyed. It found that Facebook users in the study had GPAs between 3.0 to 3.5 for users while non-users in the study had GPAs between 3.5 to 4.0. Also in the study, Facebook users said they averaged one to five hours a week studying, while non-users said they studied 11 to 15 hours per week.
Karpinski said she wasn't suggesting in the study that Facebook directly causes lower grades, only that there's some relationship between the two factors. "Maybe [Facebook users] are just prone to distraction. Maybe they are just procrastinators," she told TIME.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Facebook will make you dumb!
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23 comments:
Those with ridiculously high GPAs are just nerds, and dont have a social life.
Interesting study, perhaps it indicates that....wait, I have some notifications on my facebook page that I have to check. Be right back.
Facebook is for neophytes. Constantly and frantically substituting pictures of oneself on a web-site so others may see certainly won't cause you to become less smart. Still, it's easy to see that people who are willing to devote hours of their time to such a superficial and empty endeavor cannot - when push comes to proverbial shove - function at a high academic or professional level.
The study would have done better to separate how often "facebookers" use the site. I imagine those who do not pour over the website for hours each day are significantly more productive than those who do.
That is not true. When I went to Lenoir-Rhyne College in 2002, I never had facebook and I had one of the lowest GPA in the class. It improved a bit since. When I got facebook in 2004, my gpa went up in air!! Then I went to UNC-Greensboro to study my second degree and my gpa is waaaay over 4.0 and its currently 4.0 gpa for both fall and spring semesters. Facebook are awesome and it help you find your old friends and having reunion!!
This study doesn't provide anything of instructive value.
All it really suggests is if one elects to allocate more of her potential study time to something other than studying, then she is more likely to have lower grades than those who use more potential study time to actually study.
You could substitute television, working out, eating, google chatting - whatever - for "facebook" and you should get a similar result.
This is a significantly flawed study in which more than half of the respondents were graduate students (who tend to get mostly As and Bs or they are thrown out of graduate school). The respondents were picked "from classes where I knew the professor" according to the researcher; that's a convenience sample rather than a valid and representative picture. And the actual grade difference is statistically not very significant when you look at her numbers. But the Ohio State public relations department, who put out the press release that all this who-hah is based on, sensationalized the results and now we have a bunch of misinformation in the blogosphere. Until we get a much more valid study and see its results, you could as easily blame lower grades on the availability of laptops or Starbucks' caramel macchiatos as you can on Facebook. So don't believe everything you read, even on "The Daily Views."
Its impossible for Facebook to make you dumb... but dumber? yes
maybe just dumb people use facebook. At least they are not as bad as the morons who "twitter." No one cares whay you are doing
12:01 wrote
"Those with ridiculously high GPAs are just nerds, and dont have a social life."
So sitting in front of your computer talking about youself is a social life???
dang, wish i graduated with a gpa in either of those ranges. freaking 3.0 is good!!!
In a follow up story, the Wall Street Journal basically debunked this. The study was quite flawed. Why is the observer using old data?
Well my statistics professor always said that a sample of the human population with less than 1,000 datapoints wasn't a valid statistical sample. If you screen using this criteria it is amazing how much falsity is being foisted off on the public by an irresponsible media daily - or is there a conspiracy to keep us worried and not looking at what is really going on because 320 people in Finland showed an increase in lung cancer from eating peanut butter?
@ anon 12:35: Don't you mean narcissist, not neophyte?
@ the author: correlation does not imply causation. If the Red Sox have a lot of wins during the same season that Nabraskans produce a lot of corn... it does not mean that one's success affects (or causes) the other...
*Nebraskans*
Correlation does not imply causation. Come on, guys. Facebook doesn't lower your GPA; all the time spent on the computer rather than studying does. It could've been time watching TV, eating, IMing, anything. It's procrastination, not Facebook.
Yep, if your on Facebook all day and night... your social life is BOOMING!!! haha
I think I'm dumber after reading these comments.
Mama said, face book is the devil.
It's not only "not exactly" what the study found; it's not at all what the study found. The only people "paying attention" to the results are people who read a press release from OSU and are too clueless to ask what the study actually looked at and what it found (yes, that includes some especially gullible writers at Time, the Times of London and other outfits).
The use of a nonprobability sample means some of the correlations are prima facie invalid. A one-shot survey can't come close to establishing causation. At least one assumption that underlies the statistical procedure was either violated or just ignored. The study isn't without merit, but it doesn't do any of the stuff that the Obs (or Time, or the Times) says it does.
Judging from the comments, most of your readers are morons. That doesn't mean you have to be too.
Substitute Charlotte Observer for Facebook in the headline.
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