This is the kind of research that always makes me feel a bit itchy. For the research, the scientists used machine learning to analyze over 7 million social media posts and were able to predict the academic success of Russian high school students with an accuracy of 94%. The model generates its predictions based on… Read More Show me your tweets and this computer tells you if you will succeed in school?
It’s something Paul Kirschner and I have written about before, and a new review study confirms: using electronic media while doing schoolwork negatively impacts learning. But even worse: any students believe they’re immune to any ill effects because they’re good multitaskers, which they’re not. From the press release: Scanning social media while listening to a… Read More New review on multitasking while learning: a big problem, but also an opportunity?
When people do research on social interactions on social media, what are they really trying to examine? And how do they do this? The latter quite often through self-reported measures ending up with claims about addiction to social media to answer the first question. This new satirical article by Satchell et al applies the same… Read More This scientific and at the same time satirical article is just great: Development of an Offline-Friend Addiction Questionnaire (O-FAQ): Are most people really social addicts?
A new review study by Amez and Baert examined the existing research on the use of smartphones and the consequences for academic success. In short: A predominance of empirical results supporting a negative association. This finding is driven by studies relying on actual GPA measures. But, there is one important limitation: The literature’s main limitation… Read More Does the smartphone hinder learning? New review study suggests ‘yes’, but…
ResearchED at home started today with Dan WIllingham
When I speak to parents and teachers about texting, things often get awkward soon. They all know the situations of teenagers sharing nude pictures with each other while e.g. in a relation, but things go wrong when those pictures are shared beyond that relation. Many adults will say ‘just don’t sext’, but that doesn’t seem… Read More Is it time to teach teens ‘safe’ sexting?
The past week my wife and I watched both The Inventor and the Netflix documentary about the Fyre Festival. This was both a great idea and a bad one. First the trailers, so you know what I’m talking about. The Inventor tells the true story behind the ‘Edison’, Theranos the company who made this machine… Read More Maybe it’s a good/bad idea to watch these two documentaries in a row (about Tech and Education)
I’m sure this still will come as a big surprise to many, but it’s pretty difficult for results to be as clear: Time spent using social media was not related to individual changes in depression or anxiety over 8 years. This lack of a relationship was found even in the transition between adolescence and… Read More A new 8-year long longitudinal study on time spent on social media shows a non-impact on mental health
It’s an often repeated claim, but it seems hard to proof: our smartphones seem not to be the reason some of our children feel worse. From the press release: A new study, published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, suggests that the time adolescents are spending on their phones and online is not that bad.… Read More Maybe it’s not the smartphone: study of 400 teens finds little evidence linking excessive smartphone use and mental health outcomes
The past few years we saw many negative effects of Facebook, but not all is negative. In short: Type of friends affects building social capital via Facebook and traditional media. Facebook compensates for traditional media with friends from high school. With college friends, those with lower self-efficacy gain more from Facebook. With college friends, those… Read More A different kind of result: Facebook can help college students with lower confidence build relationships
