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Bassam Alharbi

Professor Malcolm Campbell

UWRT 1104

9/29/2017

Is Social Media Good or Bad for Students?

Introduction/Overview:

The project will study how much of impact does social media have on students academic

performance. In our modern world, social media has become a big role in our lives. However,

there is a debate that says using social media a lot could affect students academic performance

and their GPA. Therefore, I would like to know does Social media impact positively or

negatively on students academic lives by studying the changes on students GPA in the past three

years since social websites became a part of our social life.

Approaching to any social application it becomes easier than the past, for example, 15

years ago people did not have a Facebook that could help them to communicate with each other,

or Twitter to spread they ideas or perspectives in social subjects. However, the new generation

has been blessed because social media made everything easier for them, you can approach any

application through your smartphone, who does not have a smartphone? And you could speak

with anyone overseas with one click on your phone, no one is foreign now, the entire world

becomes smaller than you imagine because of technology and social media specifically.

According to Amanda Lenhart report (2015) published by Pew Research Center, 92% of

teenagers are using social media daily, which is a big number. So back to our question, does it

affect their academic performance? While many articles have been published talking about this

issue such as Reynol Juncos article the relationship between multiple indices of Facebook use
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and academic performance, he says time spent on Facebook and checking Facebook was

negatively related to overall GPA. This study made on college students and shows the negative

impact of social media on students GPA. On the other hand, according to the article The Effects

of Social Media on College Students written by Qingya Wang, Wei Chen, and Yu Liang says

that social media could impact positively on the lives of college students, they said its an

effective way to release pressure, for example, when they study and do not have a long break to

rest, using their smartphones and checking social application could relief their minds.

I focused in the beginning of my research on media which is a big subject that includes

many topics, then after reading and writing question I landed on this topic which is the impact of

social media on students academic performance, I found that this topic has a lot to offer, it is still

going on, people still studying the impact of social media and getting different results. I used CQ

database which was my primary resource to find a topic, UNCC library was also one of my

stations to read about the topic, most of the articles I read on this topic were from the library

database. ScienceDirect database has many journal articles and studies that focused on my topic,

I tried to read as much as I can to understand my topic and find where the complexity of topic is.

Many researchers found that social media impact negatively on students academic

performance, they list many reasons such as students check their social media websites more

than spending time on studying material, the lack of searching for information by themselves,

which mean students attend to use Google, Yahoo or any available website to find quick answers

to their questions and sometimes they are not reliable resources, and the most reason that I have

read is students multi-tasking, and checking their social media websites while studying, which

shows lack of learning process and academic performance. Even though there are many studies

shows multi-tasking could be helpful for students to improve their strategies for studying, and
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social media could help them to communicate with their family and friends and release the

pressure of college, especially for international students or freshman students.

Initial Inquiry Questions:

How much of negative and positive impact do social media do on students academic

performance? How can we reduce the negative impact? What are the ways that we can find to

change the negative impact to a positive impact and get the best of social media to students?

My Interest in this Topic:

Im interested in finding how much of impact does social media have on me as students,

this topic is related to me and I do not want social media to affect my academic life. My parents

always when they see that I get low grade on an exams they will blame my phone and that I

spend a lot of time using my phone on social websites, although I dont think it because social

websites, in my opinion, whenever I get low grade it because of me that I did not work hard

enough. I always thought that social media is one of the best things that happened in this century,

as an international student it helped me to communicate with everything that is happening in my

country through Twitter and Facebook, and see what my family and friends are doing in their

weekends through Instagram and Snapchat. Therefore, Im reading and studying this topic to

know the possible negative impact and try to avoid it and to know how to get the best of social

media to help me with my college years.

I already know some of the positive and negative impact of social media, and how those

reasons are related to student academic performance. However, I hope to learn the possible ways

to avoid the negative impact and turn them to become positive impact that students can use to

improve their academic performance.

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Next Step:

Im planning to continue my reading about the topic by using the library database and CQ

researcher database, and I will find more journal studies to help me to understand the issue more

clearly through ScienceDirect database. Also, I will do a survey for college students, in general,

to see how much of impact they have gotten from social media in the past three years on their

academic performance. Lastly, I would like to speak with some specialists in the education field

in UNCC and see how their view on this topic is.