Advice to fellow students!

In International English, we discussed an article called "Facebook hits exam results by 20 per cent". Then we were asked to write a little about it on our blog.

Here is a link to the article

In short, the article describes a study that indicates facebook may contribute to lower grades among many students.

The study showed that students who used facebook at the same time as they were working on an exam – even if just a little – had, on average, 20 per cent lower results than students who did not. 210 students between the ages of 19 to 54 were examined by researchers in America. The study determined  that Facebook users scored a grade point average of 3.06, while non-Facebook users scored an average of 3.82. Furthermore, three-quarters of those who used social networking websites while studying, did not believe it was affecting their studies in any negative manner.

This study puts in doubt a commonly held view that young people's brains are adept at performing several  tasks on electronic devices at the samt time.

Professor Paul Kirschner, author of the paper, said many students – while working with schoolwork– would have Facebook or other similar websites running at the same time. This causes distractions and while students may believe they are doing more in less time, they are in fact using more time to finish individual tasks and also are also making more mistakes.

This article is very interesting as I can relate to it to a great extent. While I recognize Facebook to be extremely distracting while trying to concentrate on my homework, it has become a very big part of  my generation's social life and is hard to shut off. The constant “checking” if anything is new for fear of missing out on something going on, has become a daily routine for many. The problem however, is that this routine appears to have a negative impact on our learning and ultimately our grades.

The lesson to be learned here is that when studying you should be studying, and that's that. Facebook and other social networks are for later and should be turned off during homework! We should really be focusing while working with assignments and exams, rather than spending twice as long on a result half as good as it could otherwise have been.