The relationship between social media addiction and critical thinking and academic motivation in high school students

Adolescence is a critical phase in which intense changes occur in the areas of psychological, physiological, social, emotional, cognitive, personality and identity development. Our research is to examine the relationships between social media addiction, critical thinking and academic motivation in adolescents and the relationship of these variables with demographic factors. This educational universe of the model using relational scanning includes a total of 510 high school students, 275 female and 235 male students, in the high schools in Van. Personal Information Form, Adolescent Social Media Addiction Scale, Academic Motivation Scale and Critical Thinking in Daily Life Scale were applied to the participants. Data analysis was done with IBM SPSS 29.00 program. Independent sample t test, one-way ANOVA, post hoc Gabriel, post hoc Games-Howell, Pearson correlation analysis, and simple linear regression analyzes were applied in the analysis. As a result of the analysis, significant relationships were found with personal data. It was found that the social media addiction level of female students was higher than that of male students, and the reasoning and evaluation dimension, which is the sub-dimension of the critical thinking scale in daily life, of the 9th grade participants was significantly higher than the other grades. According to the participants' "having" close friends, their academic perception level being "high", and their internet usage preference being "lecture", academic motivation and its sub-dimensions and critical thinking in daily life and its sub-dimensions levels were found to be high, while social media addiction scores were found to be low. It was found that those with "low" academic perception levels had low scores on academic motivation and its sub-dimensions and critical thinking in daily life and its sub-dimensions. Participants whose preference for making friends is "social media" and whose time spent on mobile phones and social media during the day is "5 hours or more" have low academic motivation and sub-dimensions and critical thinking in daily life and sub-dimensions scores, but their social media addiction scores are high. has been found. According to the correlation analysis, there was a significant positive relationship between the academic motivation scale and all its sub-dimensions and the critical thinking scale and all its sub-dimensions, while a negative significant relationship was found with the social media addiction scale in adolescents. According to the regression analysis, social media addiction was found to negatively predict 10.1% of the total variance in academic motivation and 10% of the total variance in critical thinking in daily life. Academic motivation explains 34.8% of the total variance in critical thinking in daily life and predicts it positively.