English

Abstract

This paper gives a report of the effect of social media on undergraduate students’ achievement and interest in chemistry in the north-central geo-political zone of Nigeria. The research design adopted was a cross-sectional survey. The population of this study comprised all undergraduate chemistry students from the universities in the north-central geopolitical zone of Nigeria. 240 undergraduate chemistry students constituted the sample for the study and 80 students each were randomly selected from all the four levels of the three sampled Universities namely; Nasarawa State University Keffi, University of Abuja, and Federal University of Agriculture, Makurdi. Structured questionnaire tagged: Effect of social media on achievement and interest in chemistry (ESMAIC) was the only instrument used for data collection. The questionnaire used was validated by experts and pilot tested to establish a reliability coefficient of 0.88. The finding of this study reveals that 60.8% of the respondents engage on social media mainly for educational related purposes while 52.9% of them agreed that social media has helped in increasing their grade point average (GPA). The interest of 67.5% respondents was boosted when employing social media for learning, and Facebook is most frequently used among the network sites by students. Addiction, distraction, poor time management and health problems are some of the disadvantages of continuous engagement with social media. Results also show that many students did not agree that social media is not an effective tool for studying and some are still hesitant on adopting modern technology while some are not very proficient on its usage. It is therefore recommended that students should be educated on how to maximize the potential of the different social network sites for their academic benefits among others. Key words: Social media, interest, achievement, undergraduate chemistry students.