The use of the internet, and in particular web browsing, offers many potential advantages for educational institutions as students have access to a wide range of information previously not available. However, there are potential negative effects due to factors such as time-wasting and asocial behaviour. In this study, we conducted an empirical investigation of the academic performance and the web-usage pattern of 2153 undergraduate students. Data from university proxy logs allows us to examine usage patterns and we compared this data to the students' academic performance. The results show that there is a small but significant (both statistically and educationally) association between heavier web browsing and poorer academic results (lower average mark, higher failure rates). In addition, among good students, the proportion of students who are relatively light users of the internet is significantly greater than would be expected by chance.
* Academic performance present the early findings of how internet use affects collegiate academic performance. This study focuses on students' dependence on the internet and attempts to quantify to what extent students are addicted to the internet. It was found that a significant percentage of students whose academic performance was bad indicated that the internet kept them up late at night, thereby making them tired for lectures the following day @cite_2 . Strong evidence was found to suggest that students' excessive use of the internet is associated with academic problems, however it was unclear if these students would have had similar problems even without the internet being so readily available. These findings demonstrate the need for more research into this field, and specifically the need for hard data to be analysed, and compared to the self-reported data available from other surveys.
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Recent research at colleges and universities has suggested that some college students’ academic performance might be impaired by heavier use of the Internet. This study reviews the relevant literature and presents data from a survey of 572 students at a large public university. Heavier recreational Internet use was shown to be correlated highly with impaired academic performance. Loneliness, staying up late, tiredness, and missing class were also intercorrelated with self-reports of Internet-caused impairment. Self-reported Internet dependency and impaired academic performance were both associated with greater use of all Internet applications, but particularly with much greater use of synchronous communication applications such as chat rooms and MUDs, as opposed to asynchronous applications such as email and Usenet newsgroups. Objective: To assess Internet use, abuse, and dependence. Participants: 411 undergraduate students. Results: Ninety percent of participants reported daily Internet use. Approximately half of the sample met criteria for Internet abuse, and one-quarter met criteria for Internet dependence. Men and women did not differ on the mean amount of time accessing the Internet each day; however, the reasons for accessing the Internet differed between the 2 groups. Depression was correlated with more frequent use of the Internet to meet people, socially experiment, and participate in chat rooms, and with less frequent face-to-face socialization. In addition, individuals meeting criteria for Internet abuse and dependence endorsed more depressive symptoms, more time online, and less face-to-face socialization than did those not meeting the criteria. Conclusions: Mental health and student affairs professionals should be alert to the problems associated with Internet overuse, especially as computers become an integral par... The purpose of the study was to gather descriptive information about college students' Internet use and to explore the relationship between types of Internet use and well-being. The sample consisted of 312 college students (67 female; age range 18-49 years; M = 21.34 years, SD = 5.05). Self-report questionnaires were administered in a large undergraduate psychology course. Exploratory factor analyses suggested 5 specific types of use: Meeting People, Information Seeking, Distraction, Coping, and E-mail. Confirmatory factor analyses on a new sample from the same university (N = 169) verified the 5-factor structure. Using the Internet for coping purposes related to depression, social anxiety, and family cohesion more so than frequency of use. This study highlights the importance of examining types of Internet use in relation to well-being. College students rely on increasingly data-rich environments when making learning-relevant decisions about the courses they take and their expected time commitments. However, we know little about how their exposure to such data may influence student course choice, effort regulation, and performance. We conducted a large-scale field experiment in which all the undergraduates at a large, selective university were randomized to an encouragement to use a course-planning web application that integrates information from official transcripts from the past fifteen years with detailed end-of-course evaluation surveys. We found that use of the platform lowered students' GPA by 0.28 standard deviations on average. In a subsequent field experiment, we varied access to information about course grades and time commitment on the platform and found that access to grade information in particular lowered students' overall GPA. Our exploratory analysis suggests these effects are not due to changes in the portfolio of courses that students choose, but rather by changes to their behavior within courses.