<p>I have some issues with the believability of this article, aside from the total lack of any statistical information or hard facts at all. </p>
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<p>…‘Something important’, huh? What was the subject matter? What was being measured? </p>
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<p>‘Worse students’? That’s incredibly vague. Were the students performing on some kind of standardized exam that was being given, or were the researchers just arbitrarily determining which students were performing better than others? If an exam was being given, what was the subject matter involved?</p>
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<p>Yet no citations are provided to those study results. Where is any of this coming from? </p>
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<p>So this particular researcher is making a profit off of his book which argues that technology affects attention span… while conducting a study to determine whether or not it actually does. That’s definitely not biased. :p</p>
This is a blog post in a website intended for the general public, not a scholarly article in a peer reviewed journal, and thus should not be treated as such. I’m sure the author, who has spent years in grad school and probably years after that as a postdoc learning how do properly conduct and analyze research understands these basic methodology issues that high school students are expected to know very well. His results are probably published somewhere - look at that, not this.</p>
<p>@aldfig0 - there are plenty of articles published in scholarly journals by doctoral students and professors that have major errors in them. I remember doing research for a psych article in one of my courses and found a single article that was arguing against tons of other research claiming the opposite hypothesis (can’t for the life of me remember exactly what the hypothesis was at the moment). Then, scrolling down through my list of results, I came across another “article” (usually referred to as a “response to…”) that basically told everyone to forget the results of the previous article; there was an error in the statistical collection and once corrected, the results were no longer significant. But because the previous article was already set up for publication, it was too late to pull it and an edit had to be printed in the next volume. How embarrassing that must have been…and yes, this was in a major scholarly journal in the field of psychology, not “Psychology Today.”</p>
<p>Also, in academic literature academics and professionals are always questioning each others’ basic claims and how they are interpreting data. So just because someone with an advanced degree publishes a study does not mean the study is free of error and should not be questioned. This peer-reviewing process is critical to the advancement of accurate insights.</p>
<p>Even if the above article was written as a blog post, its quality is an insult to the average person who should also be able to question what terms such as studying something “important” and “worse students” really mean. Critical thinking should not only be left to the scientists, otherwise we’d be led to believe everything claimed must be true. Even news articles for the general public usually try to incorporate some statistics - or SOMETHING - to give credibility to the information they are spewing.</p>
<p>Kids who are checking fb every 15 minutes probably aren’t the best students, regardless of the fact that they are checking fb. I support the correlation not causation theory.</p>
<p>I never said anything about the research process being free of errors. I am saying that you cannot judge the merits of research results without actually looking at the actual paper itself (and having considerable background knowledge of the field). Stating that the results of some research as not believable after reading a blog post is absurd, as well as making blatantly obvious statements like “correlation does not imply causation” (as if these researchers, who do this for a living, are not aware of this and have not thought of ways to get around it). Anyways, what qualifies as a good blog post to you may not be for someone else (you might be satisfied with a certain amount of statistical information but someone else might want more).</p>
<p>For those of you throwing around the “correlation vs causation” argument in an attempt to sound intelligent, please stop. It’s one thing to attack this study’s credibility based on other factors (as some other posters have done), but this study (if you had actually read the article) was made to find a causal link between checking Facebook (and other distractions) and the quality of the student’s studying.</p>
<p>If this was a survey of a group of people, and the portion of the group that said they checked Facebook often had lower grades, then you could say, “well, there might just be a correlation.” But this type of study is in a controlled environment (meaning that there are as few as possible variables), so that a causal link can be accurately determined.</p>
<p>Now, I would agree that the study, or the article, was not written (or necessarily conducted) in a scientifically credible way. But that doesn’t mean that you can pull out the “correlation vs causation” argument.</p>
<p>dfree makes a rather good point. There’s just a key demographic (the stupid one) that’s associated with excessive Facebook use. Facebook being a direct cause is a bit of a far-cry.</p>
<p>I think CC takes more of a toll (not on my grades but on my sleep). I check Facebook pretty infrequently, but I check CC all the time. It keeps me from completing my homework at a timely hour. I must change this habit by next school year…</p>
<p>Whoever said the thing about a controlled environment is wrong that it means one can infer causation. This was an observational rather than experimental study so we can not draw any conclusions of causality. Furthermore, I will reiterate that there are many mistakes among scholparly articles particularly when it comes to statistics.</p>