A New Structural Model for Student Success: The Role of Social Media Use, Engagement, Effort and Background Variables of Students in Higher Education (original) (raw)

ICERI Proceedings

Abstract

As part of my PhD research, I investigate the influence of the use of social media by first year students in higher education. In this research I have lessened the amount of variables, from Tinto's theory, by including only the best-proven predictive variables, based on previous studies. Hereby, avoiding the capitalization of chance so that a more easy to use model for teachers and management has been built. The latent variable 'satisfaction' is constructed by using just a fraction of the original manifest variables and tested using principal component analysis to prove the model can be simplified. Furthermore, I enriched the model with the use of social media, in particular Facebook, to better suit students' contemporary society in the developed world. With principal analysis on Facebook usage, I measured the purpose of Facebook use (information, education, social and leisure) and the use of different pages amongst students. This provided different integration/engagement components, which are also included in the simplified model. For the principal component-analysis, Cronbach's alpha and Guttman's lambda-2 showed internal consistency and reliability. SPSS AMOS was used for testing the fit of the model and showed reasonable values for the normed fit index (NFI), the comparative fit index (CFI), the Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) and the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA). This study will compare different background variables within the model to uncover the possible influences upon student success, engagement/satisfaction and social media use. Ultimately this paper will provide a better insight into what kind of influence social media can have upon student success. INTRODUCTION1 Some forty years ago, Tinto [1] coined his integration theory in which he built a model to explain the success of students in higher education. He stated in this theory that the more a student feels at home at the institute, the better the success or the less chance of attrition. Furthermore, he distinguished social and academic integration, which was initially not based on survey data. However, the theory was empirically tested by other researchers who then suggested improvements. For example, independent of the social or academic integration, the various backgrounds of students had a direct effect on students' success [2]. In later work Tinto [3] and other studies [4][5] pointed also to external forces. A study by Beekhoven [6] showed that these external forces especially have influence on non-residential and urban colleges. This eventually led to abandoning the dichotomy of social and academic integration and inclusion of an element from the rational choice theory by Coleman [7] 'expected duration.' The study showed that the latter was a better predictor of student success than integration and found the data from the integration variables too capacious. Despite the difficulties from the integration theory, elements of the theory are used in different studies and for different purposes. The Dutch government annually monitors rational decisions that can influence students' success, such as 'time spent on study' and 'time spent on work. Maybe even more important, most institutions evaluate their courses and overall education, each semester or trimester, by measuring these variables along with the degree of satisfaction 1 The introduction is an adjusted version of the introduction from the paper Factor analysis of satisfaction and engagement

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