Learners' and social media engagement: an investigation into sandwich students' social media behaviour

Abstract

The study examined the engagement behaviour in social media of the Ekiti State University Sandwich students studying at Kwara State College of Education florin study Centre. It examined students 'prevalent engaged activity on social media. It also determined students ' engagement status on social media. It further examined the relationship between age and students' social media engagement status, and between gender and students ' social media engagement status with a view to re-directing students' social media engagement to learning oriented activities. A cross-sectional descriptive survey design was adopted. The sample size comprised 320 students selected across different contacts using simple random sampling technique. A validated questionnaire tagged Social Media Users' Behaviour Assessment Questionnaire (SMUBAQ) was used as data collection instrument for the study. Results revealed that nearly fifty percent of the sandwich students used social media for socializing. Also, most of the Sandwich students were active users of social media platforms. Age, gender was significantly related to students ' social media engagement status. The study concludes that sandwich students engaged in socializing activities than other activities such as academic and learning, entertaining and information seeking while majority of the students were active social media users. It is therefore, recommended that students should be taught on how social media platforms can be adapted for academic engagement and learning purposes.