Students’ Perceptions on Social Networking Sites Influence on Academic Performance

This study attempts to obtain students’ perceptions on how social networking sites impact their academic performance. In this paper a survey was conducted by distributing 325 questionnaires to selected students from the Faculty of Computer Science and Information System, UTM Skudai campus students and 320 out of it was completed. The purpose was to obtain respondents’ opinion on the use of social networking sites and its influence on their academic performance. The study confirmed that most of the younger students are engage in the use of SNSs mainly for socializing activities rather than for academic purpose. However, most of the students do feel that the SNSs have more positive impact on their academic performance. From the analysis of respondents responses to the researchers questions as indicated in question 1 to 4 in table 5, the highest mean score is 2.97 which are responses to the question “Addiction to social networking sites is problematic because it affects my academic performance’. Similarly the highest mean score is 3.64 which are responses to the question “Through the use of SNS I can share information and resource materials with FSKSM members (videos, pictures, files, links etc) and this improve my academic performance”. Hence there is need for FSKSM policy makers to evolve strategies to guide and ensure that social networking sites are adopted mostly for academic purposes especially among the undergraduate students of the faculty.