Twitter undermines learning, study says

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This article was published 01/06/2019 (2624 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Twitter, used by 126 million people daily and now ubiquitous in some industries, has vowed to reform itself after being enlisted as a tool of misinformation and hate.

But new evidence shows the platform may be inflicting harm at an even more basic level. It could be making its users, well, a bit witless.

The finding by a team of Italian researchers is not necessarily that the crush of hashtags, likes and retweets destroys brain cells; that’s a question for neuroscientists, they said.

Rather, Twitter not only fails to enhance intellectual attainment but substantially undermines it, the economists said in a working paper published this month by the economics and finance department at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan.

“It’s quite detrimental,” Gian Paolo Barbetta, a professor of economic policy at the private research university and the paper’s lead author, said in an interview with the Washington Post. “I can’t say whether something is changing in the mind, but I can say that something is definitely changing in the behaviour and the performance.”

To the best of his knowledge, Barbetta’s study is the largest and most rigorous examination of Twitter’s effect on student achievement, with applications to learning and information retention in other areas of life.

The investigation drew on a sample of roughly 1,500 students attending 70 Italian high schools during the 2016-17 academic year. Half of the students used Twitter to analyze The Late Mattia Pascal, the 1904 novel by Italian Nobel laureate Luigi Pirandello, which satirizes issues of self-knowledge and self-destruction. They posted quotes and their own reflections, commenting on tweets written by their classmates. Teachers weighed in to stimulate the online discussion.

The other half relied on traditional classroom teaching methods. Performance was assessed based on a test measuring understanding, comprehension and memorization of the book.

Using Twitter reduced performance on the test by about 25 to 40 per cent of a standard deviation from the average result, as the paper explains. Jeff Hancock, the founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, described these as “pretty big effects.”

Notably, the decline was sharpest among higher-achieving students, including women, those born in Italy and those who had scored higher on a baseline test. This finding, the paper notes, bolsters the conclusion that blogs and social networking sites actively impair performance, rather than simply failing to augment learning.

A spokeswoman for Twitter declined to comment on the study. The company does not purport to make its users smarter. But its mission statement sets forth goals not so different from those of a literature course — “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers.” And in describing the platform as a “digital public square,” Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, appeared to embrace civic and social aspirations, saying last year that the standard to which the company should be held is “building a systemic framework to help encourage more healthy debate, conversations and critical thinking.”

Barbetta said more results were necessary to draw definitive conclusions about the “possible negative effects” of Twitter on learning. “As results accumulate, we definitely should be more wary about how we use social platforms,” he said.

The study focused narrowly on high school literature students. But that approach gave the researchers access to a large sample, as several hundred Italian schools had already adopted a framework for Twitter-based conversations about literary masterpieces, called “TwLetteratura.” The method also allowed them to avoid problems plaguing past studies, some of which allowed participants to opt in to social networking, skewing the data toward those with an aptitude or particular interest in online engagement.

Karen North, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, said the study had stark implications for politics, adding that its findings were hardly surprising.

“It’s the same problem that we have with the level of political discussion,” said North, who previously worked on science and technology policy in Washington, both in the White House and on Capitol Hill. “People get 280 characters and it’s not enough. Without the full background, you’re more likely to be led astray.”

— Washington Post