IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND LEARNING BEHAVIOUR ON STUDENTS’ ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE

Abstract

The primary objective of any educational institution is to provide high-quality education that instills values and enhances students’ academic achievement. Social networking applications are essential tools for connecting with people globally. Today, students are using social media apps for entertainment, sharing thoughts and knowledge. These platforms have both positive and negative effects as per their usage. The students' data were collected through a research methodology comprising social media usage, psychological behavior, study strategy, and academic performance which is the dependent variable and others are dependent. This paper presented the comparative analysis of performance of the designed models such as linear regression, decision tree, support vector regression, and random forest for academic performance prediction. The models were evaluated using metrics such as Mean Squared Error (MSE), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), R-squared, and Adjusted R-squared.  Social media app usage is increasing; therefore, we analyzed its impact on students' academic performance and found that the students with poor academic performance spent more time on social media apps. This study identified several factors that influence students' academic achievement, and among them, the learning behavior has a strong positive correlation with performance, whereas psychological factors have a negative impact. Therefor there is need to develop conducing environment for study where students are not allowed to use their mobile phone and provide assistance in developing good study habits to excel academic performance..