Impact of Students` Participation to a Facebook Group on their Motivation and Scores and on Teacher`s Evaluation.

Abstract

The development of Information and communications technology (ICT) has brought rapid and profound changes in the field of Education. Nowadays, teachers and students alike are engaging on social networks such as Facebook. This study discusses the benefits of using social network in the classroom. It aims at assessing the impact of Facebook on students` motivation and scores in a course of European Literature in a university of central Taiwan. A class of students was taught during the first semester of academic year 2013-2014 (September-January) using a traditional way of teaching. During the second semester (February-June 2014), the teacher used multimedia and Facebook to teach to the same students. They joined a "secret group", that is a group in which only students from the class can join, post, view posts, like, and comment. This research compares various data from the first and second semester to measure students` improvement in motivation, their participation to the group and their scores. The data collected from the Facebook group during the whole second semester and students` evaluation of the educator at the end of each semester. Students are expected to make some progress and teacher`s evaluation should improve. Even though Taiwanese students generally read and write in Chinese on Facebook, it is expected that they exclusively use English to read, share, and comment texts and information concerning the books studied during the second semester, thus increasing their chances to improve their reading and writing skills.