Effect of Social Media on Academic Performance of Students in United States

 

Effect of Social Media on Academic Performance of Students in United States

           In recent years, social media has slowly replaced the role of traditional media as the latest news platform and a place where everybody could interact and form friendship online. Though social media contributed many benefits to the society, problems such cyber-bullying, decline in productivity and health issue are byproducts of social media. In particular, I would like to highlight effect of social media on academic performance of students in United States . Decline in academic performance among the younger generation would be a threat to the economy as it would imply a deterioration in quality of the country's future workforce. Besides that, students who suffer academically may experience low confidence and indirectly affect their career planning. The current proposed solutions include relegating responsibility to the parents to control their children and limit access to social media websites in school computer lab. Although these measures could cope with the problem temporary, but will fail in the long run as students will eventually access social media outside of the school and their house. Therefore, I will attempt to explore impact of deterioration in academic performance on students in United States. Furthermore, I will explore solutions that focus on educating the students on effective usage of social media and making social media an integral part of the school curriculum.

          Firstly, declination of academic performance poses a threat to their confidence and career path of students while the country's future economy may suffer due lack of quality workforce. Students who perform poorly in school will lose confidence on their intellectual skills and lower their self-esteem. Consequently, this lack of confidence will worsen their academic performance because confidence is highly correlated to academic performance(American Society Horticultural Science, 2011). Furthermore, poor academic result may hinder and prevent students from taking degree related to their aspired career due to unfulfilled academic pre-requisite. For instance, a student who fail his or her Biology subject in school would be unable to enroll in Medicine or Dentistry. These students most likely need to take foundation course which will hinder or delay their graduation. In addition, strong academic achievement also helps to promote job attainment in career of interests(College Success, 2009). On the hand, the impact of academic performance to sustain need of the economy for trained professionals should not be underestimated. Generation of students with decent academic performance is required to fulfill the market demands and maintain productivity of the country.

          Present solution to this issue relies heavily parent and school to control social media usage of students. The enforces restriction on amount of time spent on social media website and also include the use of monitoring software by the parents. However, this is simply not effective because it did not focus on altering intrinsic motivation of the students, instead it focus on the infrastructure. The student could still access social media website through other means such as visiting Internet cafe or using a friend's laptop. Research has shown that changing one's intrinsic motivation is fundamental to behavior change(Yogarabindranath, 2013). Therefore, a better solution would be to focus on educating the students on power of social media and its many wonderful uses besides interacting with friends. For instance, social media education should be conducted by the school to teach proper usage of social media and better utilize it for academic purpose. However, it will take time for students to change their behavior overnight;therefore, parents need to cooperate with the school in this programme.

          Another proposed solution is to include social media as an integral part of lesson plan by the school authority. Instead of limiting access to social media websites, the solution take advantage of social media as a tool for teaching. This method is used by Alcohol Anonymous during their session to change the habit cycle of those who suffer addiction to alcohol, and it involves changing the routine when a cue is triggered. In this case, the cue would be visiting social media website and the routine would be surfing aimlessly on the website. Charles Duhigg claims that by changing the routine with the desired routine, one is able to alter his or her habit cycle(Charles Duhigg, 2012). The desired routine would be using social media for school work and conducting academic research which will help to boost academic performance if they students maintain this habit loop.

          Effect of social media on academic performance of students in United States bring about many unwanted consequences such as economic repercussion. Proposed solutions include educating students about proper usage of social media and integration of social media into school curriculum would help to reduce the negative impact in the long run. However, let us not forget that there are other issues such as online sex abuse and cyber-bullying that are equally dire.

References

American Society for Horticultural Science. (2011, April 4). Student confidence correlated with academic performance, horticultural science class study finds. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 11, 2015 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110404105901.htm

Duhigg, C. (Feb 2012). The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. Published by Barnes & Noble.

College Success. (2009). 'The Path to Career Success: High School Achievement, Certainty of Career Choice, and College Readiness Make a Difference. College Success. Retrieved March 11, 2015 from http://www.act.org/research/policymakers/pdf/PathCareerSuccess.pdf

Yogarabindranath S.N.(2013). Intrinsic motivation: how can intrinsic motivaion play a pivotal role in changing clinician behaviour? Journal of Health Organization and Management Vol. 27 No. 2.