Impact of social media use on academic performance of university students

Abstract

This study aimed at examining the effects of social media use on students’ academic performance in universities. The study objectives were to determine the effects of social media platforms used on the students’ academic grades (CGPA). The study was carried out among 230 students at the school of statistics and planning from Makerere University. Most of the respondents from the study were females (50.43%) compared to males. Most of the respondents used social media for Research and Education (46.96). The most used social media platform by respondents was WhatsApp (42.17). The study showed that types of social media platforms used by respondents had no significant effect on students’ academic performance while purpose of social media and number of hours spent on social media highly had a significant effect on students’ academic performance. CGPA had a high negative correlation (-0.8443) with number of hours spent on social media by respondents. Furthermore, the students who used TikTok on average had a CGPA of 0.245108 higher than those students that used WhatsApp and the students who used social media for Business purposes on average had a CGPA of 0.1370303 lower than the students that used social media for Research and Education. The students and educators have been recommended to strive for a balanced approach between social media usage and academics, and develop strategies to minimize distractions and leverage the positive aspects of social media for learning and research. The students should use social media for research, learning and education purposes on several educative platforms to gain knowledge about academic work and productive ideas/skills such as writing proposals, reports and among other official documents.