The Use of Social Media by Students for Problem Solving Or Emotional Support on an Academic Basis in The Article Academic Help Seeking

Academic Help Seeking: A Framework for Conceptualizing Facebook Use for Higher Education Support Research Article Assignment

The name of the article I read is Academic Help Seeking: a Framework for Conceptualizing Facebook Use for Higher Education Support. The article was posted in TechTrends for the Association of Education and Communications & Technology, and published as of December 12th 2016. The authors include Paul V Amador and Julie M Amador. In this article the authors are investigating how students use social media as a source for either problem solving or emotional support on an academic basis, specially involving Facebook. The article uses the Social Learning Theory in the sense that it focuses on individuals and the way they subconsciously learn socially to use social media to their benefit and create a sense of comfort in that type of socialization. It goes deeper to specify how students more times than not tend to express concerns and emotions about their academic lives, but they do not consider it to be an academic post. For the most part, based on the study, people believe they are socializing only on social media regardless of the content because of who they interact with online.

The authors do not make specific references to other articles on this topic, they do however occasionally use quotes of authors with similar topics to one they wrote like for example Nelson-Le Gall’s article Help Seeking: an understudied problem solving skill in children published in 1981, and C Made, J Meek, and T Hooley’s article Facebook, social integration and informal learning at university: ‘It is more for socializing and talking to friends about work than for actually doing work’ published in 2009. The use quotes in the article to make themselves believable, but they fail to entirely connect the quotes to their investigation. I found that unless you have read all of those other articles the relevance of the quotes is little to none other than filler sentences. I do take into consideration I, a non sociology major, or a working scientist am the targeted audience, but the lack of connection between the quotes and the actual article makes the quotes entirely irrelevant, simply in my opinion.

The investigation of the study is how social media can be used academically and how it is thought to be socially by its users because it is on a social media site. The research question of the study is how Facebook specifically is used academically, and how people perceive it to be socially because Facebook is known to be a social site, and because typically the people who read and comment back on posts are friends and family. “This purpose of this study was to understand how higher education students, specifically preservice teachers, used Facebook to seek academic help. Results indicated that participants who regularly used Facebook to seek academic support formally and informally, considered the network to be social in nature, generated a sense of community through online interactions, and sought help for academic task completion. A framework for understanding help seeking is provided for higher education personnel working to support the academic success of students.” The study included six preservice teachers all who were currently enrolled in both a public college and a teacher education program. According to the researchers the sampling technique for participant selection was purposeful. The candidates had to have been using Facebook for two years before the study and agree to become friends with an academic advisor at their institution one year before the study began. The method used in the study as written in the study was “This purpose of this study was to understand how higher education students, specifically preservice teachers, used Facebook to seek academic help. Results indicated that participants who regularly used Facebook to seek academic support formally and informally, considered the network to be social in nature, generated a sense of community through online interactions, and sought help for academic task completion. A framework for understanding help seeking is provided for higher education personnel working to support the academic success of students.” The data was collected online one year after the students had become friends on Facebook with the academic advisor from their institution. They used both quantitative data analysis collecting statistics and keeping a number report of the times the site was used in regards to academics and not, and in a qualitative data analysis with interviews of the students after they retrieved the data to understand what the students thought of their posts and to further understand how they did no perceive the posts to be academic even if they did mention academics unless it was either a requirement for a class or they were asking a specific question or they were specifically asking for help. The data retrieval method used in the study according to the study was, “This purpose of this study was to understand how higher education students, specifically preservice teachers, used Facebook to seek academic help. Results indicated that participants who regularly used Facebook to seek academic support formally and informally, considered the network to be social in nature, generated a sense of community through online interactions, and sought help for academic task completion. A framework for understanding help seeking is provided for higher education personnel working to support the academic success of students.”

The conclusion drawn from the study was that although the students did not perceive that they were using the site academically they used the site statistically more in regards to education than socially, whether they were asking for help or emotional support, or whether they were asking formal or informal questions, and whether they needed a specific response on a post or they were just mentioning school in a general comment on the site. Students do however take into consideration after they are interviewed how some of them do in fact use social media to their benefit in terms of task completion, “This purpose of this study was to understand how higher education students, specifically preservice teachers, used Facebook to seek academic help. Results indicated that participants who regularly used Facebook to seek academic support formally and informally, considered the network to be social in nature, generated a sense of community through online interactions, and sought help for academic task completion. A framework for understanding help seeking is provided for higher education personnel working to support the academic success of students.” Their hypotheses were supported as this is what the researches expected to find after the conclusion if the investigation. There was a box/cube chart shown to demonstrate whether students were more likely to post is written in passive, social, and informal while least likely to write a post active, academic, and formal. The limitation of this study as mentioned in the article is that it is one sided in the sense that the posts are grades formal/informal, academic/social, and/or active/passive by the researcher regardless of how another person may or may not view a post to be. I believe additionally that the article is limited due to the limited number or candidates and the uneven number of people sex wise. There were four women and only two males which may have altered the data versus there being four males and only two women. To alter the study and address both the author’s and my concerns I would first add more people to the study in which case I am enlarging the sample size tremendously, then I would also base the grading skill both on how I and or the researchers viewed the posts to be and also how outsiders might perceive the posts to be. And thirdly I would even out the sexes on both sides to ensure that the data was not swayed based on gender. I would also relate the research to age, because I have found in my own group of friends that the amount of support whether emotional or not changes significantly depending on age. The older we become the less we need validation from the internet. For example, in my family I am a middle child of five kids, my oldest sister who is twenty six uses social media the least she claims it is not a real connection and that comments on pictures should not be the basis for self worth. However, my youngest sister who is fifteen, uses social media religiously in terms where a harsh comment can cause her extreme emotional damage, and hurt her over all self esteem. The connection is thought that when my oldest sister was young she depended on the love of strangers and the compliments just the same as my younger sister but with age claims she never real needed it and was only fooling herself because society forced her into believe she needed the support of every in the world in order to be happy with herself and her decisions. The point is, that though the article reaches its goal in determining that people on Facebook use it educationally, it fails to make the point of why, or why any one should care for that matter.