— Does the "F" in Facebook stand for an "F" in school? A new
study says that college students who are on Facebook while
studying or doing homework wind up getting 20 percent lower
grades than students who don't have the social networking site
in visual range, or even running in the background on their
computers or mobile phones. The study, reported in the Daily
Mail of Britain, was done by Netherlands psychologist Paul A.
Kirschnera of the Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies
at the Open University of the Netherlands, and Aryn C.
Karpinskib of Ohio State University. It will be published in the
journal Computers in Human Behavior. Kirschnera told the Daily
Mail that his team studied 219 U.S. university students between
ages 19 and 54, and found that Facebook users had a typical
grade point average of 3.06, while "non-users" had an average
GPA of 3.82. The psychologist said the study wasn't about
whether Facebook's good or bad, but goes more to the stereotype
that younger people are fluid multi-taskers