The impact of internet usage on the academic performance of third years students: a case student of School of Statistics and Planning, Makerere University

Abstract

This study investigates the influence of internet use on the academic performance of third-year students enrolled at the school of statistics, Makerere university. With the rapid proliferation of digital technology, the internet has become an integral part of the academic experience. The aim of this research is to examine how the frequency use of internet, purpose of internet, source of internet and user acceptance of technology relate with students’ academic achievements. The study used the descriptive research design and adapted cross sectional survey design because it was conducted across participants over a short period of time. An overall sample size was 222 participants but due to a few constraints, a total of 213 participants were used. The study adopted convenience sampling and simple random sampling whereby the researcher selected school of statistics as it was convenient to him and the participants for the survey were then selected randomly. The study used self-administered questionnaires to collect data. To ensure consistency in the study, the researcher used reliability and validity of instruments, data was processed to ascertain the accuracy, consistency, uniformity, proper arrangement and completeness of data, the researcher used the computer for data entry, editing (cleaning), data coding (categorization), data summarization, data presentation took from frequency tables analyzed data using SPSS. The study discovered that most(39.9%) of the respondents used 1-2hrs weekly on academic research, followed by 16.4% that used below 1hr weekly on academic research, followed by 16.0% of respondents that used 3-4hrs on academic research weekly, followed by 19.7% of respondents that used more than 4hrs on academic research and finally 8% of the respondents that did not answer this section because they don’t use internet to better their academic performance. The study revealed that there is a significant relationship between internet use and academic performance.(p=.000<.050, X2=81.887).