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Nov 17, 2010

Can Twitter Make You Smarter?

Can using Twitter make you smarter? A new semester-long study found that college students who used Twitter for educational purposes earned GPAs a half-point higher than a non-tweeting control group.

In a group of 125 students at an anonymous medium-sized public college in the Midwest, 70 students used Twitter to access information and complete class assignments; the remaining 55 students used a more typical Internet-based course-management system and billboard. Not only did the tweeting 70 earn higher GPAs, they also reported much higher levels of engagement. The findings were reported in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning.

Some early-adopting professors have advocated experimenting with Twitter in the classroom — "essentially asking students to pass notes during class," as the Chronicle of Higher Education once put it. This study may vindicate such an approach. But one professor quoted by the Chronicle expressed skepticism that Twitter alone could have led to such a remarkable boost. "I think more could be done to understand the range of ways that the Twitter design can work better in class assignments and collaborative note-taking," said Dave Parry, a UT Dallas professor who himself has experimented with Twitter in his class.

Meanwhile, to the dismay of more traditional professors, students can point to a new justification for pulling out smartphones in class.

15 comments:

Matte said...

Maybe

pixel said...

smarter is quality not quantity

Anonymous said...

post is interesting, it leaves me in a balanced comment. might be making people smarter who knows.

SuciƓ Sanchez said...

All I've seen indicates the converse.

SimsGuy said...

It definitely has something to do with the inherently clunky nature of web-based college collaboration sites. A simple forum would probably work better too.

dragnlamer said...

Excellent post!

Banana said...

i think students are not neciseraly smarter, looks to me they are just studying more efficiently

TravisTouchdown said...

holy crap this sounds like it could be a good idea. it seems like all of the current content-distribution systems in universities are inadequate compared to twitter

CookingManiac said...

not a chance

Anonymous said...

Hogwash

Sinisa said...

I don`t think so...

Fred said...

Interesting - I like the thought.

Peanutzzz said...

I dont think twitter is a good way of studying lol... we use skype and its awsome :P call conferences ftw!

befashionistic.blogspot.com/ said...

Smarter is a subjective concept

killerkun said...

Kind of makes sense to me :D