Going Social: Implications for Facebook Usage in Education

Abstract

Social media has played a critical role in information sharing, revolutionizing the manner in which professional and personal communication takes place. Nevertheless, many educators still primarily rely on traditional forms of communication to engage parents. Social media sites such as Facebook offer schools the opportunity to connect with parents using non-traditional, two-way communication tools. The purpose of the study was to identify parents’ preferred means of communicating and to determine the effectiveness of Facebook to facilitate parent-teacher engagement. Data was collected from parents whose students were enrolled in regular and honors freshman algebra classes in a high-poverty, high-minority suburban high school. Frequency distribution was used to examine parents’ communication preferences and contingency analysis was used to examine parents’ support for Facebook. Findings from this study showed that while parents prefer a variety of traditional and non-traditional communication tools, they do not yet support parent-teacher communication via Facebook.