Facebook *not* bad for grades: Study

I’m “guilty” too – NetFamilyNews added its headline and a brief post to the mountain of media coverage last month about “a draft manuscript suggesting that Facebook use might be related to lower academic achievement in college and graduate school,” as three social-media researchers put it in the latest issue of FirstMonday, an online academic journal. The authors – Josh Pasek, Eian More, and Eszter Hargittai at Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, and Northwestern University, respectively – published a much more definitive report on this subject, looking at a large sample of undergrads at University of Illinois, Chicago; a “nationally representative cross-sectional sample” of US 14-to-22-year-olds, and a “longitudinal panel” of US 14-to-23-year-olds. “In none of the samples do we find a robust negative relationship between Facebook use and grades,” the report. “Indeed, if anything, Facebook use is more common among individuals with higher grades. We also examined how changes in academic performance in the nationally representative sample related to Facebook use and found that Facebook users were no different from non-users” in terms of academic performance.