Social media exposure of public elementary pupils: Its influence on their academic performance

Social Media is a group of internet based application that allows the creation and exchange of users generated content (Kietzmnn,2012). Adding to it, he pointed out that social news site is also a social media site. Andreas and Michael (2010) emphasized that social media is a group of internet based application that builds on the ideological foundation and allows the creation and exchange of users – generated content. It is for the reason that Social media has become one of the major channels of chatting through platforms such as 2go, BB chat, blogger and wiki a. There has been an increase in the mobile social media which has created new opportunity for browsing. The internet usage effect of social media, in views of Nielsen (2012) is that, students continue to spend more time on the social media than any site. This study aimed to find out the Social Media exposure of the public elementary pupils in Mocag Elementary School and its influence to their academic performance. This study made use of the descriptive-correlational design and documentary analysis. The design is appropriate considering that the study ascertained the student's exposure to social media in relation to their academic performance. The respondents of the study were the 40 grades 4 to 6 elementary pupils of Mocag Elementary School who have access to social media. Total enumeration was used for the pupils who have access to social media. In gathering the data needed, the questionnaire-checklist was used. The questionnaire was adopted from the study of Peter (2015), however it was modified to suit the research study. The questionnaire consisted of three parts. For the profile of the respondents, the frequency count and percentage were used. The weighted mean was computed to determine the mean score of the student-respondents’ time spent for social networking and the perceived influence of social media exposure in the academic performance mean range was used. Descriptive statistics such as frequency counts and percentages were used in analyzing demographic variables of the respondents while the interferential statistics like Chi-square (x) was used to test the stated hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. Based from the result, the researcher concludes that in today's generation, young learners are exposed to the use of social media. Facebook is the most social media the respondents are exposed to. The pupils of Mocag Elementary School of Baggao South District particularly Grades IV, V and VI were not highly addicted to social media since most of them spent 1 to 60 minutes online with overall mean of exposure of 37.67 minutes only. Hence, the study exposure to social media does not influence the academic performance of the respondents. Furthermore, some of the profile of the respondents influenced their exposure to social media. Based from the findings and conclusions of this study, the following recommendations are strongly presented that the respondents should have a longer exposure to educational sites like Google to improve their academic performance. While they are monitored by their parents and teachers on how they use diversity of social media. And teachers should ensure that learners use social media to improve their academic performance.