Investigating the effect of students' learning approaches on social media usage in computer education

Learning approaches are classified as deep and surface, they are dependent to the course given, learning environment or the students' characteristics. It is important to determine the students' learning approaches and giving appropriate feedback or interventions to foster the learning process. Thus, the students who have surface learning approaches can improve their success by identifying and transforming themselves to deep learning approach. However, in order to perform these interventions, the patterns of students with deep and surface learning approaches must be investigated. Recent studies showed that social media use in computer education had positive contributions to learning process, but the interaction patterns of students with different learning approaches has not be examined in a social media supported computer education course. For this purpose, the study focused on learning approaches of students' gain scores in a computer course and learning approaches of students in terms of social media interactions. Main purpose of this research is to determine the effects of students' learning approaches on social media usage in computer education. There were 159 students who took CET110 – Basic Computer Application course which was a social media supported computer education course participated to the study. Pre-test and post-test which were consist of 25 multiple choice questions were applied in order to determine their gain scores. Learning Approach scale was applied to decide the students' learning approaches. Students' social media posts which were calculated based on activities on Twitter are observed in some different variables: Twitter score, number of reply to instructor tweet, number of reply to peers' tweet, number of content share and number of multimedia (photo, link, video etc.) share. A quasi-experimental design was applied with pre-test and post-test applications. The participants were divided to two different groups according to their learning approaches, and they were encouraged to share, tweet, ask, favourite and discuss on the computer education course topics with their peers or instructors in pre-class or after-class activities. Students' posts were related with class activities. The results showed that there was no significant difference between the scores for surface learners and deep learners in terms of their gain scores of computer education. In addition, the number of replies to instructor tweet of students who were deep learner were higher than students who were surface learner and reply to peer tweet and share content of students who were surface learner were higher than students who were deep learner. In summary, deep learners mostly reply to instructor tweet and they also showed more interaction scores in Twitter but surface learner tends to reply to their peers' tweets, share content and share photo, link, video. The results can be used for further researches to focus on effect of learning approaches to use social media in computer education.