Abstract
The proliferation of social media over the past two decades has compelled the educators and researchers to explore the ways and means by which these technologies have affected the education system. One of the main challenges is to assess the perceptions of the various stakeholders involved. The purpose of this study is to build a model that assesses the perceptions of pre-service teachers toward the educational usage of social media. Applying the chief tenets of Uses and Gratification theory a structural model was extended by incorporating a new construct, Motivational Influence. The model examines the relationships among the constructs that are associated with the educational usage of social media. The reliability, validity, and the hypothesized relationships were tested using Exploratory Factor Analysis, Confirmatory Factor Analysis, Structural Equation Modeling, and path analysis. The findings suggest that the proposed new construct Motivational Influence is the most important factor in anticipating the adoption of social media. The results also indicate that the educational usage of social media is directly explained by purposes of social media usage and indirectly by social media adoption. The proposed structural model also explained 69.1% of the variance in the educational usage of social media and displayed a good fit with the data. Practical and research implications of the findings were also discussed.
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Saini, C., Abraham, J. Modeling educational usage of social media in pre-service teacher education. J Comput High Educ 31, 21–55 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12528-018-9190-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12528-018-9190-4