Twitter use, while similar to chatting with faculty and students on a learning management system, proved far more interactive, according to the report. About 30 percent of faculty tweets were responses to student comments on questions. Faculty responses accounted for 1 percent of Ning activity.
Faculty members involved in the research were required to frequently check their Twitter feeds for student tweets—a strategy that fostered more constant communication with students.
“The introduction of Twitter into the learning process mobilized faculty into a more active role with students that was different than when using Ning,” the report said. “Students in both the Twitter and the Ning groups received the same information and performed the same activities; however, Twitter [use] lent itself more to a conversation between students and faculty.”
The report continued: “While Ning announcements took the form of static bulletin board postings, Twitter announcements were met with active responses by students, which were met by even more interaction by faculty.”
Research suggesting that Twitter use can help increase student engagement and success differs from a report released in December 2009 claiming that “there is no correlation between the amount of time students spend using social media and their grades,” although the latter research included students’ use of Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn, among other social media websites—and it didn’t examine the use of these services strictly for academic purposes.
The University of New Hampshire’s Whittemore School of Business and Economics published the 2009 study, which examined students’ social media habits and whether posting Facebook status updates, scrolling through friends’ photos, and Twitter use affected their GPAs.
Nearly seven out of 10 Twitter users achieved high grades at the university, defined in the study as A’s and B’s. Three in 10 finished the semester with lower grades, meaning a B or lower.
Only 14 percent of student participants used Twitter, which ranked fourth in social media use behind Facebook, YouTube, and blogs.
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