Will social media usage enhance students’ group performance? – Implications of the tie strength [1596]

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Wed, Sep 6 2017, 10:40am – 12:00pm
Authors: Cong Qi, Hao Ran Pan, and Yin Ting Chan
Room: Mountford Hall (G)
Theme: Moving from the practical to the ‘publishable’
Type: 20-minute session

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Description

The wide adoption of social media has encouraged university teachers to consider employing social media as an innovative e-learning platform. Social media are expected to promote online connections, maintain relationships and boost communication between students (Hung and Yuen, 2010). They are also treated as pedagogic tools to influence team or task performance in Education (Vanwynsberghe and Verdegem, 2013). In this research, we reflected our innovative practice of using Facebook, especially Facebook group in one of our undergraduate courses. The research context is a project-based learning environment where university students form into small teams and discuss their group project mainly via social media platforms. At the end of the semester, 135 students participated in the survey. This research aims to find the role of social media usage in promoting effective communication and enhancing group task performance. Moreover, since the students collaborated via social networking platform, we introduced the concept of (social) tie strength (the level of closeness) for an additional consideration of the grouping method to better facilitate students’ online communication.

There have been extensive debates on either the positive or negative role of using social media for learning purposes; there are also relatively rare discussions on the right grouping method in the social media-enabled and project-based learning environment. In view of the above, the current research addresses the following two research questions: (1) Does the usage of social media influence communication among group members and their task performance? (2) Does tie strength moderate the relationship between social media usage and communication?

In this presentation, we will first discuss the literature on social media usage in Education and the properties of the strong and weak ties. We will then introduce the social constructivism theory as the major theoretical foundation. Third, the research model, hypotheses and methodology will be presented. Last, the data analysis results will be discussed and the conclusion will be given. After listening to this session, the participants will understand that students’ social media usage would positively influence communication in group, and the effective communication online would further boost group task performance. However, contrary to the theory of social constructivism, students’ social media usage (in general) would not directly influence group task performance. Moreover, contradictory to our natural perception, we found a weak tie (loose connection) between two groupmates on Facebook would strengthen the group communication, whereas a strong tie relationship would weaken the communication. This means groupmates with a close relationship on Facebook tend to communicate less in the group project. University teachers can therefore group students with relatively weak ties on social media to enhance communication quality and overall group performance.

References

Hung, H.T., & Yuen, S.C.Y. (2010). “Educational use of social networking technology in higher education,” Teaching in Higher Education, 15(6), 703-714.

Vanwynsberghe, H., & Verdegem, P. (2013). “Integrating social media in Education,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 15(3), article 10.

Markham, T. (2011). “Project Based Learning,” Teacher Librarian, 39(2), 38-42.

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