Abstract
Social media have become part of students’ life as a result of their features and the predominant mobile smart medium of usage. In the advanced world, the social platforms have provided affordances for integration in education providing smart learning environments. However, within the Sub-Saharan African region, especially in Ghana, this phenomenon is emerging and warrants an investigation into the initial perceptions of students on integrating mobile phones and social media in the Ghanaian educational system. It is against this background that this study seeks to investigate senior high school students’ perception of the use of social media for pedagogical purposes. Bandura’s social learning theory and Vygotsky’s social constructivism theory formed the theoretical foundation of the study. The descriptive survey design was adopted for this study with data collected through a questionnaire. In all, 200 students were selected from a senior high school using purposive and simple random sampling techniques. Statistical tools such as means, standard deviation, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and regression were employed for analysis. The study found that most of the students had positive perceptions towards the integration of social media and its effects on teaching and learning. There were no statistical differences in perception based on the mean scores of ages of students, year of study and programme of study in terms of social media integration in education and effects on teaching and learning. Furthermore, the perception on social media integration in education predicted the effects on integrating social media in teaching and learning. Consequently, both the perceptions of social media integration in education and its effects on teaching and learning predicted actual usage for learning. Based on the results recommendations were provided on policy and practice of social media use for academic purposes in secondary schools in Ghana.
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We express our sincere gratitude to all the students at Kumasi Senior High School who participated in the provision of responses to the questionnaire items of this study.
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All authors developed and fine-tuned the topic for the study. However, the first author KAB developed the instrument and collected the data. All authors provided the writing of the introduction, objectives, theoretical review, conceptual development and hypotheses formulation. KAB developed the methodology with assistance from the other authors (BB and VA). KAB provided the statistical analysis, but the write up on the interpretations and discussion on findings were done by all three authors. Finally, all three authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Barfi, K.A., Bervell, B. & Arkorful, V. Integration of social media for smart pedagogy: initial perceptions of senior high school students in Ghana. Educ Inf Technol 26, 3033–3055 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-020-10405-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-020-10405-y