Social Media and Undergraduate Students’ Self-Motivation in the Faculty of Education, University of Port Harcourt Rivers State Nigeria.

Social Media and Undergraduate Students’ Self-Motivation in the Faculty of Education, University of Port Harcourt Rivers State Nigeria

Dr Fomsi Esther F.,  Ofogba Susan Takpor
Department of Curriculum Studies and Educational Technology, Faculty of Education, University of Port Harcourt

Received: 04 March 2023; Accepted: 11 March 2023; Published: 10 April 2023

ABSTRACT

The importance of emotional intelligence cannot be overemphasized. An emotionally intelligent individual is self-motivated and has the ability to manage human resources and situations. Previous studies have shown that social media has an influence on the emotional intelligence of students. This study is aimed at seeing what influence social media, WhatsApp in particular, has on the self-motivational aspect of emotional intelligence of 400-level undergraduate students in seven departments in the Faculty of Education, University of Port Harcourt. The sample size was 314 undergraduate students registered as 400-level students during the 2019/2020 session. Two instruments were used for data collection namely WhatsApp Usage Questionnaire (WUQ) designed by the authors and an adapted form of the Emotional Intelligence Scale (EIS) developed by Mehta and Singh (2013). The reliability of the WUQ was determined using test-retest method and a coefficient of 0.83 was obtained after correlating the test and retest scores using Pearson Product Moment Correlation (PPMC). The face and content validity of the instrument was also established. Findings from the study showed that WhatsApp as a social media app significantly influenced the self-motivation of undergraduate students across the seven departments in the Faculty of Education. The post hoc test revealed that the difference  One of the recommendations given based on the findings is that higher education instructors should utilize WhatsApp actively for classroom teaching incorporating activities that would motivate students to learn and perform better.

Keywords: Social media, WhatsApp, emotional intelligence, self-motivation

INTRODUCTION

Intelligence is the ability of an individual to think, learn from experience, make decisions, solve problems and adapt to the demands of the environment. In the field of teaching and learning, intelligence plays a very important role, since learning is impossible without intelligence. In other words, it is the basis for learning. There are various aspects of intelligence; there is human intelligence, social intelligence, cultural intelligence, and emotional intelligence, just to mention a few. Of all the aspects of intelligence mentioned above, emotional intelligence recently seems to be having a lot of influence on teaching and learning.

Emotional intelligence has been defined by Mayer and Salovey (2008) as the ability to engage in sophisticated information processing about one’s own and other’s emotions and the ability to use this information as a guide to thinking and behaviour. That is, individuals with high emotional intelligence pay attention to, use, understand, and manage emotions, and these skills serve adaptive functions that potentially benefit themselves and others. As such, a student will be able to communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges and defuse conflict if he/she is emotionally intelligent.

Also, emotional intelligence according to Goleman (2012) is the ability to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustration; to control impulse and delay gratification; to regulate one’s mood and keep distress from swamping the ability to think; to empathize and to hope. In the context of this study, emotional intelligence is defined as the ability to understand, use, and manage one’s emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges and resolve conflict.

Emotional intelligence, according to Goleman (2012), is categorized into five aspects; which includes: self-awareness, emotional management, self-motivation, empathy and social skills.

Self-awareness:  this aspect of emotional intelligence is the ability of the students to recognize their own emotion and how it affects their thoughts and behaviour. It also entails being able to know one’s strengths and weaknesses, and have self-confidence.

Emotional management: this aspect of emotional intelligence is the ability to realize, readily accept, as well as successfully control one’s feelings. It can also be seen as the ability of recognizing one’s emotions and learning to manage them by adopting strategies like smiling, talking to someone amongst others.

Self-motivation: this aspect of emotional intelligence is the ability to rekindle the force that keeps pushing one to go on – it’s one’s internal drive to achieve, produce, develop, and keep moving forward, when one think they’re ready to quit something, or they just don’t know how to start.

Empathy: this aspect of emotional intelligence is the ability of being sensitive to the feelings of others, caring and accepting their perspectives and appreciating the differences that exists in the feelings of others.

Social skills: this aspect of emotional intelligence is the ability of one to understand the emotions, needs, and concerns of other people, pick up on emotional cues, feel comfortable socially, and recognize the power dynamics in a group or organization.

The need for learners to acquire these five emotional intelligence skills becomes imperative given the prevailing use of social media in teaching and learning. With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, higher institutions are required to adopt the use of social media for teaching and learning. Since social media platforms encourage collaboration among learners, hence the need for emotional intelligence comes to the fore.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Social media, in the context of this study, can be defined as a platform that allows users to socially interact with each other by sending and receiving messages either synchronously or asynchronously through an internet enabled medium. Thus, social media encompasses a wide range of websites and apps. Unlike the traditional media where the readers or viewers are passive participants, social media is one place where the users are actively participating and exchanging information, sharing experience, giving their opinions and reviews based on their understanding and experience. As such, there are several types of social media which is not limited to the following discussed below:

Social networking:  Social networking is the use of Internet-based social media sites to stay connected with friends, family, or colleagues. Social networking can have a social purpose, and an academic purpose, or both, through sites like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Google+.

Microblogging:  Microblogging is posting brief and often frequent updates online. Unlike traditional blogs, which are often hosted on a custom website, microblogs are typically published on social media sites like Twitter, Tumbir or Facebook.

Instant Messaging Applications:  Instant messaging applications are a type of online chat that offers real-time text transmission over the Internet. Some Instant messaging apps can use push technology to provide real-time text, which transmits messages character by character, as they are composed. Examples include; WhatsApp, Telegram etc.

Video Conferencing Applications: Video conferencing is a type of online meeting where two or more people engage in a live audio-visual call. With a strong internet connection, the participants can see, hear, and talk to each other in real time, no matter where in the world they are. Examples include; Zoom, Google meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

Media Sharing Sites: Media sharing sites allow one to upload photos, videos and audio to a website that can be accessed from anywhere in the world. Examples include Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest etc.

Wikis: A wiki is a collaborative tool that allows students to contribute and modify one or more pages of course related materials. Examples include; WikiHow, WikiBooks, Wikipedia, etc.

Video Sharing sites:  Video sharing sites is an IP Multimedia System (IMS) enabled service for mobile networks that allows users engaged in a circuit switch voice call to add a unidirectional video streaming session over the packet network during the voice call. Examples include; YouTube, Facebook Live, Perisscope, Vimeo etc.

Social media promotes independent learning and opportunity to manage learning network. Interestingly, the use of Facebook – one of the most popular and prominent social networking sites has its origin in academia where it was mostly used by students as a tool to promote library services.

It is based on this fact that this study investigates WhatsApp usage in the classroom and undergraduate students’ self-motivation in the Faculty of Education, University of Port Harcourt.

Motivation involves a collection of closely related beliefs, perceptions, values, interests, and actions. According to Oxford learner’s dictionary (2020), motivation is the reason why an individual does something or behaves in a particular way. There are different reinforcers. Positive reinforcers, or rewards, are consequences that increase the probability of a given behaviour they were made contingent on, whereas negative reinforcers are consequences that increase the probability of a given behaviour by removing or reducing some negative external stimulus (Emily, 2011). Punishment, on the other hand, refers to unpleasant consequences that decrease the probability of a given behaviour. Self-motivation is a part of self-regulation which students are not only generally good at, but which also directly affects how well they believe that they can perform, and how challenging the goals are perceived to be. Motivation could be intrinsic and extrinsic; both play a major role in an individual.

Intrinsic motivation is actually a complex neurophysiologic activity wherein an individual goes through an intense psychological process that stems from inherent feelings. From birth onward, humans, in their healthiest states, are active, inquisitive, curious, and playful creatures, displaying a ubiquitous readiness to learn and explore, and they do not require extraneous incentives to do so. People are intrinsically motivated for some activities and not others, and not everyone is intrinsically motivated for any particular task.  This natural motivational tendency is a critical element in cognitive, social, and physical development because it is through acting on one’s inherent interests that one grows in knowledge and skills. Intrinsic motivation may increase self-satisfaction and commitment to task. On the other hand, extrinsic motivation refers to behaviour that is controlled mainly through external factors (e.g., deadlines, rewards, directives, punishers) (Lisa, 2016). This type of behaviour serves mostly to satisfy external demands, and so the source of motivation and causality for behaviour is external rather than internal. Extrinsic motivation does induce an individual to perform a certain task even if there is no interest in it. Rosalia (2010) stated the effectiveness of extrinsic motivation:

Extrinsic motivation does induce an individual to perform a certain task even if there is no interest in it. But it does not mean that the person does not get pleasure from working or completing the task. It’s just that the external reward lengthens the duration of the anticipated reward even if interest is long gone.

It paves the way for the individual to set goals. By setting their eyes on the prize, the individual will consort to playing by the rules and even develop a huge amount of persistence towards getting that reward.

Extrinsic motivators can release stress. The lack of extrinsic motivation cannot distract a person from the pressure that he gets from his job.

Extrinsic motivation is not sustainable. Eliminate the reward and you eliminate the action. Withdraw the punishment or reward, sayonara motivation!  It gives diminishing returns. Motivation slowly vanishes when the punishment or reward stay at equivalent levels. More motivation means bigger rewards.

The theoretical underpinning of this study is the social learning theory propounded by Albert Bandura in 1977. The theory stipulates that people can learn new behaviours by observing others. By this, the theory refers to a reciprocal relationship between social characteristics of the environment, how they are perceived by individuals, and how motivated and able a person is to reproduce behaviours they see happening around them (Bandura, 1977 cited in Nabavi, 2018).

Based on the postulate of the social learning theory,O’Rorke (2006) explained how the following modelling processes influence learning.

Attention: The person must first pay attention to the model.

Retention: The observer must be able to remember the behaviour that has been observed.

Reproduction: The third condition is the ability to replicate the behaviour that the model has just demonstrated.

Motivation: The final necessary ingredient for modeling to occur is motivation, as learners must want to demonstrate what they have learned.

The theory is related to this study because it postulates that people can learn new behaviours by observing others. By implication, the social media is a platform that offers students opportunities to observe as well as share their ideas. Thus, this new social media paradigm provides a sandbox where imitative behaviours are not only encouraged but are equally rewarded and widely shared. Also, students’ ability to reproduce behaviours they see happening around them is dependent on their level of self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, self-motivation, and social skills.

Several studies have been conducted to show the influence of social media on emotional intelligence

Ahmed and Banafi (2015) investigated the use of WhatsApp tools as a supportive means to increase students’ motivation to learn Medical Terminologies in Jazan University. It examines how the combination of WhatsApp enhances higher education students’ motivation to collaborate on creating creative stories by using medical terminologies. The research adopted the descriptive, analytical and empirical methods. A survey of 20 items was distributed to 60 Medical students and analysedusing SPSS.The results reached indicated that WhatsApp had a great influence on students’ motivation and better achievements. Students were active in sharing information, knowledge and responsibility for complex medical problem-­‐solving activities and in achieving the targeted cases in collaboration. The analysis revealed that learning through WhatsApp proves to be an effective, suitable and interesting technique for students.

The foregoing study is similar to the present study because both studies focused on social media and students’ motivation, but different from the present study because while the foregoing study investigated the use social media tools as a supportive means to increase students’ motivation to learn Medical Terminologies in Jazan University, and examined how the combination of Social Media enhances higher education students’ motivation to collaborate on creating creative stories by using medical terminologies, the present study investigated the influence of social media on the self-motivation of faculty of education students.

Barton, Adams, and Browne (2018) investigated the effect of social media usage on attention, motivation, and academic performance. Survey responses were collected from 659 undergraduate and graduate students to determine the relationship between social media usage and overall academic performance, as well as explore if this relationship is moderated by attention (regulation of time/study environment) and motivation (effort regulation). Both predictors, social media usage and attention, significantly predicted academic performance. Likewise, when motivation was considered as a predictor, it significantly predicted academic performance above and beyond social media usage. No moderation was found between the three variables.

Problem Statement

The recent incidence of coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic brought about the popularity of the term ‘social distancing’ which by implication means that the major means of communication is through the use of social media. Most Universities advocate for the use of social media for teaching and learning. The University of Port Harcourt in particular suggests the use of WhatsApp voice notes and video notes. As such this would encourage more undergraduate students and even lecturers to adopt social media networking platforms for the majority of their conversations which involves student-student, student-tutor, and student-content communication. However, what could be a problem in this type of communication medium is the fact that students whose self-motivation is low may not be eager to learn using WhatsApp.  They may lack the ability to use the information at their disposal to guide their thinking, and actions and that of others. Would the frequent use of WhatsApp as a means of learning influence the self-motivational aspect of students’ emotional intelligence? This is the problem this study seeks to address.

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which frequent WhatsApp usage in the classroom influences undergraduate students’ self-motivation to learn and engage in classroom activities across the seven departments in the Faculty of Education, University of Port Harcourt.

Research Question

The research question that guided this study is:

What extent of influence does frequent WhatsApp usage in the classroom have on undergraduate students’ self-motivation to learn across the seven departments in the Faculty of Education, University of Port Harcourt?

Hypothesis

One null hypothesis was formulated for this study which states: WhatsApp does not significantly influence undergraduate students’ motivation across the seven departments in the Faculty of Education, University of Port Harcourt.

METHODOLOGY

The study adopted the survey research design to determine the influence of frequent WhatsApp usage in the classroom on undergraduate students’ self-motivation which is one aspect of emotional intelligence, in the Faculty of Education, University of Port Harcourt.The sample size of this study comprised314 final year full-time undergraduate students from seven departments registered during the 2019/2020 academic session in the Faculty of Education, University of Port Harcourt. Out of the eight (8) departments in the faculty, only seven have 400-level students.

Two instruments were used for data collection. The first instrument was a questionnaire constructed by the authors titled: WhatsApp Usage Questionnaire (WUQ); the instrument consisted of 17-items to measure frequent WhatsApp usage by undergraduate students.. The instrument was made up of two sections.  Section A sought for the demographic information of the respondents, while Section B comprised of items related to WhatsApp usage rated on a modified four (4) point rating scale, with responses ranging from Very Low Extent (VLE) -4, Low Extent (LE) – 3, High Extent (HE) – 2 and Very High Extent (VHE) – 1, with a mean criterion of 2.5.

The second instrument was adapted from the Emotional Intelligence Scale (EIS) developed by Mehta and Singh (2013). The original instrument consisted of 50-items with 10–items to measure each of the emotional intelligence dimension. However, the aspect that measured self-motivation containing 10 items was used for this study. The items of the questionnaire were rated on a modified four (4) point rating scale, with responses ranging from Very Low Extent (VLE) -4, Low Extent (LE) – 3, High Extent (HE) – 2 and Very High Extent (VHE) – 1, with a mean criterion of 2.5. The two instruments were subjected to face and content validity. Proper scrutiny was done by experts in Educational Technology and Measurement and Evaluation. Based on their corrections and suggestions, modifications were done on the instruments. To ensure the reliability of the WhatsApp Usage Questionnaire (WUQ), test-retest method was applied for a measure of its internal consistency. Copies of the instrument were administered on twenty students at two different occasions within two weeks in the Faculty of Humanities, University of Port Harcourt outside the sample used for the study. Their responses to the items on the Questionnaire was correlated using the Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation (PPMC) to obtain a reliability co-efficient of 0.83. The research questions were answered using mean and standard deviation while the hypotheses were tested using the analysis of variance (ANOVA) at 0.05 level of significance.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Research Question: What extent of influence does WhatsApp usage in the classroom have on undergraduate students’ self-motivation to learn across the seven departments in the Faculty of Education, University of Port Harcourt?

Table 1: Mean score and standard deviation of the influence WhatsApp usage in the classroom has on undergraduate students’ self-motivation to learn across the seven departments in the Faculty of Education, University of Port Harcourt

Table 1 showed the extent to which WhatsApp usage in the classroom influences undergraduate students’ self-motivation across the seven departments in the Faculty of Education, University of Port Harcourt. The result indicates that WhatsApp usage had more influence on students of LIS (mean = 34.00, SD = 2.37), followed by students of KHE (mean = 33.28, SD = 4.15), DAE (mean = 32.55, SD = 5.98), EDC (mean = 32.43, SD = 4.69), EDF (mean = 29.63, SD = 10.13), EDM (mean = 27.19, SD = 9.67), and EDP (mean = 25.72, SD = 9.83). The implication of this result is that the usage of WhatsApp by students of LIS had more influence on their motivation as compared to students from others departments.

Hypothesis: WhatsApp does not significantly influence undergraduate students’ motivation across the seven departments in the Faculty of Education, University of Port Harcourt.

Table 2: Summary of ANOVA on the influence of WhatsApp usage on undergraduate students’ self-motivation across the seven departments in the Faculty of Education, University of Port Harcourt

Table 2 shows that WhatsApp significantly influenced undergraduate students’ self-motivation across the seven departments in the Faculty of Education, University of Port Harcourt (F₆, = 7.29, df = 307, P =0.00< 0.05). Thus, null hypothesis was rejected at 0.05 alpha level.

Table 3: Post Hoc test of homogeneity of variance on the influence of WhatsApp usage on undergraduate students’ motivation across the seven departments in the Faculty of Education, University of Port Harcourt

The result on table 3 shows that the mean differences between EDC and EDM (p = 0.00), and EDP (p = 0.00), are significant. Also, the mean difference between EDM and EDC (p = 0.00), and KHE (p = 0.03), are significant. Furthermore, the mean difference between EDP and EDC (p = 0.00), KHE (p = 0.02), and DAE (p=0.04), are significant. Also, the mean difference between DAE and EDP (p = 0.04) is significant. The implication of this result is that the disparity in the influence of WhatsApp usage on undergraduate students’ motivation across the seven departments in the Faculty of Education, University of Port Harcourt differs from department to department.

Analysis of the research question as shown in Table 1 revealed that WhatsApp usage in the classroom influences the motivation of undergraduate students of EDC, EDM, EDF, EDP, KHE, DAE, and LIS to a high extent. Furthermore, the result of the hypothesis on Table 2 showed that there is significant influence of WhatsApp usage on undergraduate students’ motivation across the seven departments in the Faculty of Education, University of Port Harcourt, while the Post Hoc analysis ( Table 3) revealed that  the disparity in the influence of WhatsApp usage on undergraduate students’ motivation across the seven departments in the Faculty of Education, University of Port Harcourt differs from department to department.

The findings are consistent with the result of Ahmed and Banafi (2015). Their study revealed that WhatsApp has a great influence on students’ motivation and better achievements. Students are active in sharing information, knowledge and responsibility for complex medical problem-­‐solving activities and in achieving the targeted cases in collaboration.

CONCLUSION

The findings showed that WhatsApp usage in the classroom influences the motivation of undergraduate students of EDC, EDM, EDF, EDP, KHE, DAE, and LIS to a high extent. Also, the findings indicated that there is significant influence of WhatsApp usage on undergraduate students’ motivation across the seven departments in the Faculty of Education, University of Port Harcourt. Thus, WhatsApp usage in the classroom has positive influence on students’ motivation. These findings support the need for the continuous utilization of WhatsApp in the classroom, which was been occasioned by the emergence of the novel corona virus (COVID-19) especially for undergraduate students.  As such educating people to use WhatsApp should be an important educational objective for effective teaching in Universities in Nigeria. Hence, Universities should take a lead role in the utilization of WhatsApp in the classroom so as to positively influence the self-motivation of undergraduate students, which by implication would enhance their academic achievement.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Considering the findings of this study, the following recommendations are made:

1. Efforts should be made by lecturers to identify the different ways learners are motivated and incorporate them in their teachings.
2. Higher education instructors should utilize WhatsApp actively for classroom teaching incorporating activities that would motivate students to learn and perform better.

REFERENCES

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