14 DAY TRIAL // If you were worried that your kids spend more time on social networks than studying, fret no more, as a new study by online academic network StudyBlue found that the overwhelming majority of high school or college students said they planned to spend most of their time online doing the latter. This might seem a little surprising but the data does come from an online studying site, not exactly the most unbiased of parties, so the emphasis should probably fall on “said” and “planned.”
The study, conducted by StudyU, surveyed about 1,500 high school and college students aged 13 to 24 about their online activities. It found that 60 percent of them planned to spend at least three hours per day studying or doing homework online, more than twice as many as those who would spend more than three hours every day on social networks (26 percent).
Other online activities were also less popular like communicating, either through email, IM or other means, which only 28 percent of them planned on spending more than three hours doing. Watching TV or online videos was on top of the priorities for only 22 percent of the respondents. Online gaming was also, apparently, not very popular among the young people, with only 9 percent planning to spend three hours or more per day playing online.
The Internet is proving a reliable information source for studying, with 84 percent of those surveyed believing that online resources had helped them in school. Furthermore, 54 percent of the students questioned thought they would be spending a lot more time studying online than in previous years. While it's encouraging to see that most students are more interested in studying online than in any other activity, coming from a company that offers online study tools and one that would presumably benefit if the parents were more inclined to believe that their kids spent their time online studying, the data has to bee taken with a grain of salt, or two.