Reasearch On The Relationship Between Behaviors On Social Network Sites And Student Engagement

Student engagement is an important issue in college student academic and development research field. Social networking sites influent college student academic and development as a major carrier of their internet activities nowadays. Foreign educators and others are interested in the effects of social media on college students while domestic research is quite rare. In the view of this, exploring the relationship between college student social networking sites use and student engagement in our country through empirical study makes a positive sense to college students’internet behavior guiding and their learning outcomes improving.A case study was carried out in this paper by using a small sample(N=242) of college students to examine the relationship between the time and frequency of RenRen use, RenRen activities, and student engagement. Following previous studies, student engagement was measured in three ways:a13item scale based on the National Survey of Student Engagement, time spent preparing for class, and time spent in co-curricular activities.The design of student engagement scale was based on Junco and other educators’research on relationship between students’social network site use and student engagement, while the translation and acculturation refer to the study of NSSE-China.Results indicate that RenRen use was significantly positively predictive of engagement scale score and of time spent in co-curricular activities, but has no relation with time spent preparing for class. Additionally, some RenRen activities were positively predictive of the dependent variables, while others were negatively predictive. Communicative activities were positively predictive of the dependent variables usually and the non Communicative activities were negatively predictive usually. College student social networking sites use is appropriate both in time and activities overall. Students engaged more on social net working sites than their peers are also tended to engage in real-life social interactions and co-curricular activities.