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Does social media lead to poor school performance?

“Horror scenarios about the supposedly fatal effects of social networks on school performance are unfounded”, says Professor Markus Appel, psychologist and Chair of Media Communications at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU). “Regarding this question, there are numerous individual studies that contradict each other, making an accurate classification of all of the results so far very difficult,” according to the researcher.

Some studies describe negative effects of Snapchat & co., others report on a positive influence, and yet others cannot point to any solid connection. That is why the researchers carried out a so-called meta-analysis: They identified 59 studies that dealt with the relation between social media use and school performance from a relevant database of scientific publications. Then they evaluated the results of all the studies together, which in total covered almost 30,000 young people worldwide.

Four important conclusions were identified by the researchers in their study. Students who tend to share with each other and communicate about school-related topics do slightly better in school. Students who engage a lot with social media while studying or while doing their homework have slightly poorer performances than other students. This form of multitasking thus seems to have a rather distracting effect.

Students who are logged into social networks very often, frequently post messages and photos, and therefore spend a lot of time, also have slightly poorer school grades. This negative effect is itself negligible, however. It’s impact is minimal. In addition, students who intensively use social media don’t necessarily spend less time studying.

So, there is no scientifically proven evidence that social media deprives students of valuable time to prepare for school. “Nevertheless, parents should be take notice of their children’s social media activities, get to know the social networks themselves and want to understand the usage patterns”, says Appel. “The less prejudice parents bring in their approach to online activities, the more effective is exchange with their children.”