Facebook students underachieve in exams

By Urmee Khan

An American study has found that students who spend their time adding friends, chatting and "poking" others on the website may devote as little as one hour a week to their academic work.

About 83 per cent of British 16 to 24-year-olds are thought to use social networking sites to keep in touch with friends and organise their social lives.

 Many offices across Britain have banned sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Bebo in a bid to stop their workers wasting time.

The study by Ohio State University questioned 219 US undergraduates and graduates about their study practices and general internet use, as well as their specific use of Facebook.

They found that 65 per cent of Facebook users accessed their account daily, usually checking it several times to see if they had received new messages. The amount of time spent on Facebook at each login varied from just a few minutes to more than an hour.

The Ohio report shows that students who used Facebook had a "significantly" lower grade point average – the marking system used in US universities – than those who did not use the site.

Aryn Karpinski, a researcher in the education department at Ohio State University said: "Every generation has its distractions, but I think Facebook is a unique phenomenon."

"Our study shows people who spend more time on Facebook spend less time studying" she said.

"It is the equivalent of the difference between getting an A and a B," added Miss Karpynski, who will present her findings this week to the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.

According to the research, 79 per cent of Facebook-using students believed the time they spent on the site had no impact on their work.

Social networking sites have seen a backlash in recent months.

Final year students at Bournemouth University started a campaign against Facebook on university computers, after complaining they could not get their work done as the computers were constantly monopolised.

Baroness Greenfield, a neuroscientist and the director of the Royal Institution, said sites like Facebook, Twitter and Bebo risked "infantilising" the minds of users, creating a generation of children who demand instant gratification.

She warned recently that conversations in chat rooms, message boards and on networking websites were replacing the face-to-face interactions that are key to developing a child's sociability and urged more research into a possible connections between high computer use among young people and the rising rates of autism.

Teenagers spend an average of 31 hours a week online, according to research.

A spokesman for Facebook said: "There is also academic research that shows the benefits of services like Facebook. It's in the hands of students, in consultation with their parents, to decide how to spend their time."