Elsevier

Computers & Education

Volume 159, December 2020, 104002
Computers & Education

Usage of social media, student engagement, and creativity: The role of knowledge sharing behavior and cyberbullying

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2020.104002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Social media use is positively association with student engagement and student creativity in graduate research training.

  • Social media use is found to have positive association with research student knowledge sharing behavior.

  • Knowledge sharing behavior mediates the positive association between social media use and research student engagement.

  • Knowledge sharing behavior mediates the positive association between social media use and research student creativity.

Abstract

Despite the increasing use of social media, very little is known about its consequences for students of graduate research training. The purpose of this study is to look into the outcomes of social media usage while answering when and how the use of social media may lead to students' creativity and engagement. Primary data were collected from 383 research students studying in different universities in eastern China. Findings reveal that students’ use of social media is related to their creativity and engagement in graduate research training through knowledge sharing behavior. In addition, cyberbullying was found to play the role of boundary condition such that the mediated relationships are weak for the students facing more cyberbullying. Limitations and future directions, as well as implications for research and practice, are discussed.

Introduction

Global Digital Report 2019 reveals that the total number of social media users in the world has been raised to 3.484 billion and it is increasing with a rapid rate of 9% per annum. Today, the use of social media is not limited to any specific segment of the society, it has penetrated to every ones' life including but not limited to students. The trend of using social media is rapidly growing in the education arena particularly for student's collaboration as the usage of social media has the potential of increasing knowledge of the users through a facilitated knowledge-sharing environment (Mäntymäki & Riemer, 2016). There are several reasons behind this popularity of social media among students which include but are not limited to its features of reaching the mass audience and a virtual interaction among them. Students today are using social media for several purposes such as searching for information and collaborating and interacting with others. Specifically, graduate research students are using several social media tools (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Researchgate, Academia.edu, and Slideshare.net, etc.) for facilitation in their research training and education projects. The use of social media is, therefore, expected to increase knowledge sharing among its user students (Ahmed, Ahmad, Ahmad, & Zakaria, 2019).

Bukowitz (1999), described that knowledge sharing is an activity through which knowledge (such as information, expertise, or abilities) is disbursed among people. Scholars, for instance, Argote and Ingram (2000); Ko, Kirsch, and King (2005) view knowledge sharing as a transfer of knowledge and information from one source to another. Scholars believe that the use of technology facilitates an autonomous and friendly environment that leads to knowledge sharing among individuals (Lai & Kritsonis, 2006; Tong, Tak, & Wong, 2015). The role of social media in educational activities and enhancing student engagement and performance is considered critical by recent researchers (Narayan, Herrington, & Cochrane, 2019).

Koranteng, Wiafe, and Kuada (2018) view student engagement as “the amount of physical and psychological energy that the students devote to the academic work” (p. 11), while creativity is understood as the ‘production of new and useful ideas’ (Wierenga, Althuizen, & Chen, 2017). Students' engagement and creativity are expected to be facilitated with knowledge sharing among students. We assume that the usage of social media among students increases knowledge sharing behavior which subsequently leads to their engagement and creative behavior in their graduate research training and education.

Although, the usage of social media increases knowledge sharing among students that further leads to students' engagement and creativity in their graduate research training. These relationships among students' use of social media and its positive outcomes are expected to be weak with the negative consequences of cyberbullying defined as “an aggressive, intentional act carried out by a group or individual, using electronic forms of contact, repeatedly and overtime against a victim who cannot easily defend him or herself” (Smith et al., 2008). Some recent studies, for instance, Sarwar, Zulfiqar, Aziz, and Ejaz Chandia (2019) have given attention to the destructive effects of cyberbullying on students’ learning and performance.

Suggesting and testing a model on student use of social media and its outcomes, our study makes several contributions to the literature. For instance, our study investigates two important outcomes of social media usage including student engagement and creativity with a specific sample of research graduates from China. Second, we not only link the usage of social media with students’ creativity and engagement in our study but also explain knowledge sharing as the underlying reason in these relationships. We propose that when students are involved in sharing knowledge and information, and exchanging ideas, knowledge, and thoughts with others through social media, this enhances their engagement and creativity in research training and education. Third, our model investigates the buffering role of cyberbullying on the relationships between usage of social media and its positive outcomes. Fig. 1 depicts the theoretical model of our study.

Section snippets

Social media, knowledge sharing behavior, and student outcomes

In the past few years, social media has come close to the people and is taking part in almost all spheres of life (Rauniar, Rawski, Yang, & Johnson, 2014; Ruleman, 2012). Social media has gained equal popularity in the field of education as recent scholars have studied a significant impact of social media in education (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2016). For example, the research found a positive relationship between the use of social media and students' performance (Alwagait, Shahzad, & Alim, 2015).

Participants and procedure

To collect data for our study, we conducted a research survey involving graduate research students from the universities situated in the Anhui Province of the Peoples’ Republic of China.

To meet our objective of investigating the relationship between social media usage and engagement and creativity of students in their graduate research training, we contacted Master's and Ph.D. research students. We generated an online survey link and distributed it through our contacts to the respondents.

Analysis and results

We examined the research model of the study using several statistical procedures, for instance, we computed the factor loading of all the items of the constructs used in our research. The results of Table 2 indicate that the loading of all the items is higher than the minimum threshold value of 0.60 as suggested by Hair, Hollingsworth, Randolph, and Chong (2017). Moreover, to compute the convergent validity of the proposed model, we examined Cronbach alpha (CA), Composite reliability (CR), and

Discussion

This research study was conducted to explore the relationships between students’ use of social media and their engagement and creativity in graduate research training. We found that the student use of social media is positively associated with their engagement and creativity in graduate research training while knowledge sharing behavior plays a mediating role in these relationships. In addition, we found the moderating role of cyberbullying in such a way that cyberbullying weakens the

Conclusion

Social media is getting popular in every ones’ life including students and researchers. This study has found important outcomes associated with the use of social media by graduate research students. Although knowledge sharing behavior has been found as the underlying reason in the positive relationships between social media use and student engagement and creativity in their graduate research training, the role of cyberbullying is critical. The boundary condition role of cyberbullying found in

Authors’ contribution

Muhammad Imran Rasheed: as a principal author of this research paper proposed initial research model, designed the method, wrote introduction and discussion sections and well as edited the whole manuscript time and again. He also handled revisions.Jawad Malik: conducted initial literature review, drafted initial theory building section, and collected the required data.Abdul Hameed Pitafi: mainly worked on empirical analyses required for this study but his support remained available throughout

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Muhammad Imran Rasheed: Conceptualization, Methodology, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing.

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