Developing a Scale to Measure Students' Social Media Attitude and their Academic Performance

Abstract

Information and Communication Technology has a clear impact on the students’ knowledge, attitude and skill sets. Apart from traditional classroom teaching, ICT provides a virtual learning experience as it would enable technology mediated learning among teachers and students. When multimedia teaching aids are used in classrooms, it elicits student’s attention, understanding capacity and memory. It helps them to understand the concept in depth and brings focus to the topic. Mobile phone and social media usage has become inevitable in today’s life. The ubiquity of smartphones made easy access of multimedia teaching aids as it user friendly and convenient (anytime, anywhere learning). The extensive popularity of social media like whatsapp, facebook, twitter, youtube, google+, linkedin, instagram and others among college students has brought a major shift in their academic performance. Apart from classroom learning, these social media provide a platform for innovative and collaborative learning experience. Students opt these technologies to assist their academic-oriented communication with their fellow learners and teachers. The aim of the present study is to develop and standardize a questionnaire to measure the college students’ attitude towards social media and their academic performance. List of 52 items were generated (with reference) from various studies and a survey was conducted among 119 respondents. Exploratory factorial analysis was performed and the result shows that there are four underlying factors—exposure, communication, addictiveness and accessibility in students’ attitude towards social media which influences their academic performance in college.