Twitter in the Classroom: Determining the ...

Twitter in the Classroom: Determining the Effectiveness of Utilizing a Microblog for Distributed Practice in Concept Learning

by

Armand A. Buzzelli

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Robert Morris University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy with a major in Instructional Management and Leadership Program July 2014

UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING

Dedication To William Frederick “Ricky” Walker III, who was taken from us too soon: thank you for teaching me to take time to reflect and enjoy the small pleasures in life, because it is short and precious. You will always be with me in heart and mind. Fresh mozzarella, prosciutto, and vinegar pepper sandwiches on me when we meet again my brother.

Copyright 2014 Armand A. Buzzelli All Rights Reserved

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING

Acknowledgements I must thank and recognize several individuals whose help and support made the completion of this study possible. First and foremost I need to express my sincere gratitude and heartfelt thanks to my committee chairperson, Dr. E. Gregory Holdan. Doc, I could not have asked for a better advisor or mentor throughout this whole process. Your passion, insights, sense of humor, and constant text messages, calls, tweets, and emails were invaluable in keeping me on task. You are definitely one of a kind. I am also very grateful to my other committee members, Dr. Robert Del Greco and Dr. Shelly Haser for their time and dedication to provide important suggestions and encouragement that were essential in producing this document. I would like to make a special thank you to Dr. Daniel Rota for taking time to edit my document without any solicitation or expectations for anything in return. You have truly taught me the importance of “paying it forward” in academia. I would also like to thank Dr. George Semich for his devotion to our program and the success of his students. I can’t thank you all enough! I would like to thank my family and friends for their support and patience throughout these past few years. To my parents and grandparents, thank you for love and encouragement in helping me follow my dreams regardless of what others may think. You all are the best role models that a person could have. Special thanks to my mom for her hours of effort helping us with homework and reading to us as kids! To my brothers, cousins, and friends, thanks for being there for me, adding fun to my life, and not abandoning me while I spent the past few years writing. To Emily, thank you for your love, patience, and acceptance of my crazy schedule. You’ve helped more than you can ever imagine! I’m glad you were able to find some TV shows that were easy for me to ignore while I read and wrote! To the members of Cohort 8A, you all are the best and I’m proud of the little family we became over the past few years. 4

UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract .................................................................................................... ……………….10 CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY ........................................................ 11 Background ....................................................................................................................... 11 Purpose of Study..................................................................................................................................... 14 Research Questions................................................................................................................................. 18 Research Design ..................................................................................................................................... 18 Definition of Terms ................................................................................................................................ 21 Assumptions ........................................................................................................................................... 23 Limitations .............................................................................................................................................. 24 Summary................................................................................................................................................. 24

CHAPTER II: REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE .......................................................... 25 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 25 Distributed Practice and Memory ........................................................................................................... 26 Concept Learning ................................................................................................................................... 28 Gagne’s Taxonomy ............................................................................................................................ 28 Additional Concept Learning Theories .............................................................................................. 31 Teaching Concepts ............................................................................................................................. 34 Problem-Based Learning ........................................................................................................................ 35 History Education and Active Learning ................................................................................................. 37 Incorporating Technology into the Classroom ....................................................................................... 40 Computer-Mediated Communication ..................................................................................................... 41 Communication through Twitter ............................................................................................................ 42 Twitter in the Classroom ........................................................................................................................ 45

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Twitter in History Education .................................................................................................................. 47 Potential Pitfalls of Twitter in Education ............................................................................................... 49 Legal Issues in Social Media .................................................................................................................. 51 Student Privacy Paradox ......................................................................................................................... 55 Navigating Social Media in Education ................................................................................................... 56 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................. 58

CHAPTER III: METHODOLOGY .................................................................................. 61 Design of Study ...................................................................................................................................... 61 Participants ............................................................................................................................................. 61 Class Descriptions .................................................................................................................................. 62 Data Collection Instruments ................................................................................................................... 63 Procedure ................................................................................................................................................ 65 Concept Instruction ............................................................................................................................ 66 Student Feedback ............................................................................................................................... 67 Pre-test Post-test Design Selection ..................................................................................................... 68 Analysis .................................................................................................................................................. 68 Research Question One ...................................................................................................................... 68 Research Question Two ..................................................................................................................... 69 Research Question Three ................................................................................................................... 69

CHAPTER IV: RESULTS................................................................................................ 70 Summary................................................................................................................................................. 70 Research Question One ...................................................................................................................... 70 Research Question Two ..................................................................................................................... 71 Research Question Three ................................................................................................................... 72 Analysis .................................................................................................................................................. 72

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING T-Test Analysis....................................................................................................................................... 72 Pretest Data ........................................................................................................................................ 72 Posttest Data ....................................................................................................................................... 74 Ex Post Facto Data ............................................................................................................................. 75 Summary of Test Results ................................................................................................................... 77 Student Survey Results ........................................................................................................................... 78 Response Rate .................................................................................................................................... 78 Demographics .................................................................................................................................... 78 Survey Analysis ...................................................................................................................................... 79 Social Media Usage............................................................................................................................ 79 Survey Validity .................................................................................................................................. 79 Twitter Activity .................................................................................................................................. 81 Research Questions ............................................................................................................................ 82 Student Engagement ........................................................................................................................... 82 Frequency of Communication ............................................................................................................ 83 Ease of Use ......................................................................................................................................... 84 Concerns with Social Media .............................................................................................................. 85 Open-Ended Survey Responses .............................................................................................................. 87 Other Types of Social Media ............................................................................................................. 89 Other Social Media used in Schoolwork ............................................................................................ 90 Professional Use of Social Media ...................................................................................................... 91 Concerns Related to Social Media ..................................................................................................... 92 Topics of Interest Related to Social Media ........................................................................................ 93 Faculty Interview .................................................................................................................................... 93 Category Development ....................................................................................................................... 94 Familiarity and Ease of Use of Twitter .............................................................................................. 95

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Student Engagement Rationale .......................................................................................................... 95 Suggestions for Educators and Future Research ................................................................................ 96 Chapter Summary ................................................................................................................................... 97

CHAPTER V: DISCUSSION ........................................................................................... 98 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 98 Research Questions................................................................................................................................. 98 Implications of the Study...................................................................................................................... 100 Limitations of the Study ....................................................................................................................... 107 Speculations and Recommendations for Future Research .................................................................... 108 Summary............................................................................................................................................... 113

Appendix A ..................................................................................................................... 116 Appendix B ..................................................................................................................... 122 Appendix C ..................................................................................................................... 124 Appendix D ..................................................................................................................... 125 Appendix E ..................................................................................................................... 138 Appendix F...................................................................................................................... 139 Appendix G ..................................................................................................................... 140 Appendix H ..................................................................................................................... 142 Appendix I ...................................................................................................................... 154 Appendix J ...................................................................................................................... 155 Appendix K ..................................................................................................................... 156

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Appendix L ..................................................................................................................... 157 Appendix M .................................................................................................................... 158 Appendix N ..................................................................................................................... 161 Appendix O ..................................................................................................................... 164 Appendix P...................................................................................................................... 166 References ....................................................................................................................... 167

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Abstract Despite the perception that face-to-face classrooms provide speaking opportunities, studies by Fassinger (1995), Nunn (1996), and Weimer (2013) have shown that there is limited interaction in a traditional college lecture setting. Social media networks such as Twitter provide an opportunity for instructors to utilize popular mobile technology to create a discussion beyond the classroom. Twitter’s 140-character maximum creates an efficient method of communication. This mixed-methods study attempted to determine if Twitter could serve as a more effective method of review than a traditional paper study guide in an introductory college history course. Tweets were spaced over a period of a four-week unit and a test was given at the end of the unit to a Twitter group and control group to compare concept learning. There were no significant differences in the performance of both groups. Themes from student surveys and a faculty interview were developed and analyzed. Key findings from the qualitative portion of the study included that participants found Twitter easy to use and implement into instruction, students were unconcerned about their privacy on social media, and Twitter did not increase student engagement in the classroom when used only as an information distribution tool. Suggestions for future research should include utilizing massed and distributed practice capabilities of Twitter, incorporating ongoing assessment into Twitter practice sessions, and determining effective methods to engage students through social media. Keywords: Twitter, distributed practice, concept learning, spaced practice, history education, social media, microblogging, mobile communication

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY Background John is a second year undergraduate, commuter student. He works in the city every day as a data entry specialist for an hourly wage, taking lists of information and inputting them into a corporate database. The position provides John with income to supplement the cost associated with attending a private university he attends in the evening. John completes his duties at work efficiently with limited interaction with his coworkers or boss. Around mid-day John takes his lunch at his desk and uses his hour break to indulge in his favorite past time: surfing his Twitter feed on his smart-phone. Once John completes his work day, he makes his nightly 45 minute commute to his suburban university campus and settles in for an introductory history class; part of his requirement for graduation. As the instructor utilizes the standard 3-hour night class time period to lecture about the British taxation of American colonists, John hides his phone under his desk and surfs Twitter again. He tweets about being bored in class and his friends share their approval. John spends the entire class watching only a select few outgoing classmates engage in the class discussion, while looking around to see most of the others have mentally checked out. On the ride home to his quiet one-bedroom apartment, John makes a mental note that he hasn’t audibly spoken a word all day. Student experiences like John’s are not all uncommon in a face-to-face classroom format. Fassinger (1995), Nunn (1996), and Weimer (2013) have studied the primary issue at hand; that despite the perception that face-to-face classroom provides speaking opportunities, only a few students are generally “responding,” and there is not as much interaction during class as one might think. Therefore educators should find a medium that can engage students who are not

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING interacting during a typical class session. Additional research from the Duke University social relationships project showed that college students cited class as the place where they feel most lonely (Asher & Weeks, 2012). Social media may serve as the bridge to create ongoing student engagement and learning beyond the class period. Social media has changed the world drastically over the past decade as it continues to explode in popularity and global use. According to statistics from an internationally syndicated market research firm, GlobalWebIndex, Twitter is the fastest developing active social media platform, with users growing from 35.5 million in 2009 to nearly 485 million users by 2013. Twitter is unique to Facebook and other social media networks because it serves as a microblogging tool (Kieslinger, B. B., Ebner, M. M., & Wiesenhofer, H. H., 2011). Twitter has been referred to as “the true global town square - a public place to hear the latest news, exchange ideas and connect with people all in real time (Wickre, 2013, para. 3).” Communication on Twitter occurs through 140-character user created posts called “tweets.” Despite an estimated 400 million tweets per day from its users, it is not necessary to tweet to get value from Twitter. A user is free to follow any account that seems interesting to them, thus creating a customizable news feed. Unlike Facebook a user doesn’t need to “friend” or “follow” every user that follows their content, thus creating a directed network of followers (Huberman, Romero, & Wu, 2008). Despite sharing similarities to other social networks, Twitter is unique in a number of ways. From a social relationship perspective, the most important difference is the ability to “retweet” a friend or followed user’s tweet. A re-tweet promotes affirmation of other users’ comments and is the ultimate form of flattery for a producer of Twitter content. Boyd, Golder

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING and Lotan (2010) found that re-tweeting provided broader sharing of information and a method for attracting new follower to a given Twitter account. Although there are some potential hazards that accompany Twitter use, the platform has grown so much in popularity making it difficult to ignore it as a potential educational tool. Millions of students are part of the 485 million active Twitter users in the world. According to a report from the Pew Research Center at Harvard, teen Twitter use has risen from 16% in 2011 to 24% in 2012. The report also stated that 33% of all Twitter users were logged in on a daily basis. In spite of the large increase, only 51% of active Twitter users claim to have posted a tweet in the last month, demonstrating a shift from the traditional view of Twitter users as self-absorbed egocentric producers, towards a more information consuming demographic (2013). It is imperative for educators to understand how their students utilize Twitter in order to best serve their needs. While Twitter is a relatively new phenomenon, founded by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Noah Glass, and Biz Stone in 2006, literature exists about its use in education. A case study by Trueman and Miles (2011) found that Twitter could be used to create interactive flash cards that can be used for review. Students developed five tweets per participant and they were consolidated into a master review board. By utilizing hashtags, the instructor found it simple to search for other flashcards from the class and organize them accordingly. “Hashtags use the # symbol and are used to mark keywords or topics in a tweet. It was organically created by Twitter users (Beginner, n.d., sec. 5)”. Twitter makes a good forum for this type of activity, because as students tweet flashcards in live time, it may serve to prompt ideas for flash cards from other students.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Similarly, students are able to post each individual flashcard as they think of them, as opposed to emailing them all or posting them all at once on the learning management system Blackboard. Purpose of Study Twitter interactions through “flashcards” can take place at any time beyond the class period and therefore can serve as a means to provide distributed practice (DP). Literature exists within the field of education on the effects of spacing the study of primary concepts versus providing comprehensive information at one time. Research on practice and memory date back as far as German psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus (1885). Cepeda, Pashler, Wixted, and Rohrer (2006) define the DP effect as “the effect of interstudy interval (ISI) upon learning, as measured on subsequent tests. ISI is the interval separating different study episodes of the same materials” (p. 354). Underwood (1961) determined DP occurred when trial intervals are greater than 15 seconds; massed practice (MP), when intervals are 2-8 seconds. Dempster (1989) found that “spacing effects can best be understood in terms of the “accessibility” hypothesis, and that spaced repetitions have considerable potential for improving classroom learning” (p. 309). The accessibility hypothesis states that memory will be accurate when the ease of accessibility is correlated with memory behavior; however, if the ease of processing is not correlated with memory in a given task, then the judgments will not be accurate (Schwartz, 1994). The theory dates back to studies conducted by Tulving and Pearlstone (1966) that worked with cued recall. Their study demonstrated that subjects who were non-cued had information reach their memory stage but not their retrieval stage in contrast to those who received spaced cues. Studies by Estes (1955), Glenberg (1979), Raaijmakers (2003), and Pavlik and Anderson (2006) found that by increasing the spacing of practice, subjects had improved recall. Likewise,

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Bahrick (1979) found that when spacing was moved closer together the recall of subjects worsened. This research suggests that the timing of reviews by instructors should be spaced increasingly further apart to improve performance. Through the use of tweets, distributed practice is possible to aid in the process of concept learning. Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin (1967) defined concept attainment (concept learning) as "the search for and listing of attributes that can be used to distinguish exemplars from nonexemplars of various categories” (p.233). Seels and Glasgow (1990) describe a process to help instructors identify important concepts for teaching by “defining what is to be learned, planning an intervention that will allow the learning to occur, and refining the instruction until the objectives are met” (p. 3). Gagne in Gagne and Briggs (1974) classified five learned capabilities as intellectual skills, cognitive strategies, verbal information, attitudes, and motor skills. Within intellectual skill, the four levels of his taxonomy included 1) discrimination 2) concrete concept 3) rule using and 4) problem solving. Concrete concept is responding in a single way to all members of a particular class of observable events and seeing the similarity in a class of items, which call for a single response. Common errors in the learning of concrete concepts include overgeneralization, undergeneralization, and misconception (Merrill, Tennyson, & Posey, 1992). Mintzes, Trowbridge and Aurnaudin (1991) discovered part of this phenomenon when testing children on animal classification. Subjects overgeneralized that all amphibious animals were fish and therefore incorrectly classified seals and dolphins. In addition to providing examples of concepts during instruction, there has been conflicting research on providing non-examples to assist in concept learning. Tennyson (1973) identified several studies (Smoke, 1933; Morrisett & Hovland, 1959, Wooley & Merrill, 1972) where outcomes varied when using non-examples. For

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING the purpose of this study, non-examples of concepts will be included in tweets shared with students. One might reason that if students only take one history course during college, it would be more important for them to identify concepts that helped shaped history, rather than memorizing a list of specific dates, battles, treaties, individuals, etc. Likewise the significance of these important historical people and events should be learned to help create better citizens. As an example, on June 1, 1865, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner commented on Lincoln’s Gettysburg address; the famous speech which now stands as a symbol for liberty and freedom, by stating: "The world noted at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech" (Guelzo, n.d., para. 3). Sumner’s quote does not discount the importance of the Battle of Gettysburg in any way, but it does bring light to the fact that there are concepts that each citizen of the United States should understand, which helped shape our country’s past, present, and future. Concept learning dates back to early educational psychology research, but it still holds a place in today’s (2014) world of high stakes testing and streamlined core curriculum in elementary and secondary schools across the country. Technology has changed society greatly in recent years with the advent of social media. Appendix A shows a brief history of social media as developed by Dr. Anthony Curtis at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke (2013). As billions of people and massive amounts of students turn towards networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vine, and Instagram on their smart phones, it is important to reach them with information where they are looking for it. While Facebook continues to be the largest social network in the world, Twitter fast approaching it in terms of popularity. Smith and Brenner (2012) at the Pew Internet & American Life Project

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING identified that 31% of adults online age 18-24 are using Twitter, which is a 13% increase from the previous year. Faculty Focus, an online site that provides resources on enhancing learning through effective teaching practices, surveyed 1,400 college faculty members and found that 35.2% used Twitter in some format. According to research from the internet marketing firm Smart Insights (2013), 50% of Twitter users utilize their mobile apps when accessing Twitter content. This would lead one to believe that creating efficient content that would be accessed easily through mobile devices would provide value to a course. While Twitter may prove to provide teachers with the arena to create effective mobile content to spur concept, there are major hazards to consider before implementing social media into the classroom. Kind, Genrich, Sodhi, and Chretien (2010) found that despite the high social media usage among medical schools and their students across the U.S., very few had formal policies to address their usage. Potential threats of social media use include privacy issues, misrepresentation, harassment, and reputation damage among others. In spite of the fact that faculty within institutions may hold the key to help students avoid these dangers, 47.9% of faculty said they never used Twitter and another 16.9% said they tried Twitter, but stopped using it (Education Business Week, 2010). Usage has grown since their previous survey, but adoption rate of social media among faculty members is still very low. Twitter would appear to serve as an ideal tool for concept learning because it requires a user to create a succinct, 140-character or word string. There is no room for additional explanation, but what would appear to be an ideal platform for examples and non-examples of concepts. It also can be easily spaced out over time, thus developing a customizable spaced practice regimen. The primary purpose of this study is to determine if sending tweets with

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING examples and non-examples related to predetermined major concepts will assist students in effectively learning concepts through distributed practice. Research Questions Questions: 1. Does utilizing Twitter as a distributed practice tool serve as a more effective review than a traditional end-of-unit study guide for concept learning? 2. Does Twitter create student engagement in the overall class discussion? 3. Is Twitter user-friendly for all stakeholders, students as well as the professor, when incorporated into instructional technology? Research Design The roots of this study stemmed from a discussion between the researcher and an Associate Professor of History at Robert Morris University (RMU). RMU is a private, regionally accredited university in Moon Township, PA with approximately 5,500 students in undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs of study. The professor was enthusiastic about the idea of using Twitter as a way to engage students in an introductory history course. Students at RMU are required to take HIST1200, which is described as “a survey of the development of the United States from the colonial era, through the establishment of the federal system, the growth of party politics, and the search for a national culture, to the emergence of a two-ocean republic.” In the spring semester of 2014, nine sections of the course were offered to students including two online sections. The methodology for this study utilized a mixed-methods study using experimental research for the quantitative portion in addition to survey research and interview for the qualitative portion. The survey was taken by all of subjects in the study after receiving the

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING treatment. Additionally, the faculty that participated in the study was interviewed to determine his findings on utilizing Twitter in their instruction. Table 1 demonstrates the data sources and analysis tools used for each research question. Table 1 Research Question

Data Source

Analysis Tool

1

Multiple Choice Test

Quantitative

2

Survey, Interview

Qualitative

3

Survey, Interview

Qualitative

For the quantitative methodology, subjects from one section of HIST 1200 were randomly placed into two groups, one that received tweets with characteristics, examples, and non-examples of 15 primary concepts from their course material, and another that received the same information in a review worksheet. Immediately following the treatment, each group was tested for concept learning and scores from each groups were compared. The study was conducted during the 2nd unit (4 week period) of the course that was pre-determined between the researcher and the faculty. The Twitter account “@RMUHistory1200” was created for the test groups to follow. Training materials were developed for the experimental group of students and faculty on Twitter basics including registering an account, creating lists within Twitter, following accounts, hashtags, and sending tweets. Training materials were distributed and discussed in the lesson prior to the start of the 2nd unit. The account was made private and students in the Twitter group 19

UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING were asked to keep the information they were receiving in tweets confidential while agreeing not to share the Twitter accounts with their peers in the control group and other sections of the course. Scores from the previous unit exam served as a measurement to determine if there were significant differences between the two groups. Some sample concepts that were studied during this unit included: dollar diplomacy, muckrakers, and “white man’s burden.” Once the experiment started, a tweet with characteristics, an example, and a non-example was created for each concept. Tweets would go out three times per day per concept, throughout the week during the duration of the unit with a standard schedule of one in the morning, (10:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.), one in the afternoon (3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.) and one at night (7 p.m. - 9 p.m.). In most cases, two concepts were tweeted in a typical day, and those tweets would typically be staggered by an hour in the morning, afternoon, and night. Tweets did go out on two separate Sundays due to schedule logistics, but students did not receive tweets on Saturdays. The same tweets for each concept were then tweeted out again later in the experiment to create a spacing effect. Each of the tweets was followed by the hashtag #RMUHistory. The hashtag #HIST1200 was considered, but was found to be an active hashtag among introductory college history elsewhere. Students could easily segregate tweets for this study by either searching for #RMUHistory, or by just viewing the list of tweets from the @RMUHISTORY1200 account. This compilation of tweets also theoretically created a cyber study guide of key terms. The researcher utilized these tweets to create a worksheet that was used as a study guide for the control group. Hash tags were removed and all other abbreviations were kept consistent with the tweets to provide the same level of information.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Throughout the unit all instruction was provided in the same format from the same professor with the exception of Twitter use for the one randomly selected group of students. The control group received one massed practice review worksheet in the class prior to their exam, which is the traditional review method for this course. After the unit was over, the students in both the control and experimental group took an exam that included a section of 15 multiple choice test questions on the concepts covered in the unit. Test questions included non-examples and examples of the concept. The dependent variable in this experiment was the post-test scores for students. The independent variable is the review method, which was distributed practice through Twitter for the treatment group and a traditional worksheet for the control group. Additionally, all students who received the treatment were given a survey, which was used to determine their level of engagement in the class and their comfort level with Twitter, in addition to other demographic questions. The professor was also interviewed to determine his thoughts and feelings about the effectiveness of Twitter and whether he considers it of any value in the classroom. Definition of Terms 1. Facebook - Social media network that connects people who work, study, or live around them. Users create profiles and add “friends” to connect build their networks. 2. Follower – A follower is another social media user who has followed you. 3. Handle - A user's "Twitter handle" is the username they have selected and the accompanying URL, like: http://Twitter.com/username 4. Hashtag – The # symbol is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It was created organically by Twitter users

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING 5. Mention – Mentioning another user in your Tweet by including the @ sign followed directly by their username. 6. Microblog – A form of blogging that consists of small posts with short sentences. Twitter is often reference as a micro-blogging site. 7. Interstudy Interval – (ISI) The interval separating different study episodes of the same materials. 8. Distributed Practice – (DP) - The search for and listing of attributes that can be used to distinguish exemplars from non-exemplars of various categories. Used interchangeably with spaced practice. 9. Massed Practice – (MP) – This effect occurs when the material to be learned is presented repeatedly in a short period of time. 10. Concept Learning – The search for and listing of attributes that can be used to distinguish exemplars from non-exemplars of various categories. 11. Retweet – A Tweet by another user, forwarded to you by someone you follow. Often used to spread news or share valuable findings on Twitter. Or the act of forwarding another user's Tweet to all of your followers. 12. Tweet – A message posted via Twitter containing 140-characters or fewer. The act of posting a message. 13. Twitter – An information network made up of 140-character messages from all over the world. 14. Vine - A mobile app owned by Twitter that enables its users to create and post short video clips.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING 15. Instragram - An online photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, apply digital filters to them, and share them on a variety of social networking services. Assumptions This study took place at a Middle States accredited university in suburban, western Pennsylvania that had approximately 5,500 students including undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs at the time of the study. The results of this study are assumed to be representative of students and faculty for institutions with similar demographics. The students and faculty utilized within this study is also assumed to representative of the typical students and faculty of the institution where the study takes place. Since this course is an introductory history course, all undergraduate students are required to take it in their core requirements and the section used was chosen at random and therefore the quantitative portion of this research study is determined to be experimental in nature. The experiment took place over a 4-week period, which is assumed to be the standard duration for one unit within an introductory history course. Additionally, students and faculty were given a training session on Twitter which will be assumed to provide them with adequate skill necessary to utilize the program. The treatment and experimental groups both had class in the same classroom. Class attendance was not taken, but since the groups were randomly assigned, it was assumed that there were no significant differences. The same instructor taught both the control group and experimental group sections, so it is assumed that students were provided the same information with the exception of the treatment.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Limitations This study took place at one institution with 20 subjects taking part in the comparative study. The subjects were chosen through convenience sampling due to time and budgetary constraints. With a sample size of approximately 20 subjects there is difficulty determining generalizability for the study. Additionally, because all of the students in the study were in the same class, the privacy settings on the @RMUHistory1200 account were made private, which may have limited potential interaction between students. Summary The primary goal of this study was to determine the effectiveness of Twitter as a tool to aid in concept learning through distributed practice. There have been studies done in recent years on utilizing Twitter in the classroom, but most are qualitative in nature. This study attempted to compare two groups of students in a college introductory history course with the experimental group receiving characteristics, examples and non-examples of key concepts through distributed tweets. While the literature on social media in education has expanded, this study may add to the literature on the subject of teaching with Twitter specifically. Because of the 140-character limitations in tweets, and its ability to deliver messages at any time, Twitter is uniquely qualified to serve as a distributed practice, concept learning teaching tool. The review of literature in Chapter II will discuss the evolution of computer-mediated communication in the form of social media to how it is used today (2014). It will also demonstrate how active learning has been proven effect methods for teaching history. These concepts will be important throughout this study.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING

CHAPTER II: REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

Despite being founded in 2006, scholarly research exists on Twitter as a communication tool and its use in the classroom, while limited information is available on utilizing Twitter in a college history course. Because Twitter is a form of computer-mediated communication that may be utilized for active, student-centered learning, there is an array of literature on its framework. Likewise, significant literature exists on utilizing active learning in history education. Concept learning and distributed practice, which are vital parts of this study, have their roots in psychological research that occurred as early as the 19th century. Introduction “Twitter always seemed like such a waste of time to me,” said John McGee, Assistant Principal at Fox Chapel High School, a wealthy suburban school located six miles from Pittsburgh, PA. “I thought it had no value on any level, especially in education. I would often roll my eyes when I’d hear teachers talk about using it.” Despite its widespread global use, McGee was not alone in his initial view of Twitter or social media in general. Professionals across industry preach about the dangers and trouble that can be created by misuse of social media. As Oravec (2012) stated, “reputation management issues in the context of these media provide difficult issues concerning privacy and reputation in part because of the willful release of a great deal of personal information by participants” (p. 95). Despite these concerns, with 255 million active users ("About Twitter, Inc. | About", n.d., para. 2), Twitter’s popularity makes it difficult to ignore it as a potential educational tool. One subject area that appears to be inherently compatible with Twitter is history. Studies have shown that inquiry based or problem-based learning can be effective way to engage students and 25

UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING promote learning in history and social studies (Brice, & Catania, 2012; Arnold, 2010; Holcomb, Beal, & Robertson, 2009). The collaborative communication environment of social media makes it an effective platform to incorporate problem-based learning into curriculum (KyeongJu, Pellegrino, & Engelhard; 2012). Additionally, as Twitter lends itself towards a “backstage feeling” for celebrities, famous individuals, and micro-celebrities (Marwick & Boyd, 2011), it appears to be useful for in depth studies of individuals and concepts from history. The ability to share information beyond a class session provides a platform for distributed practice, which may contribute to a spacing effect. Spacing effect has shown that subjects more easily remember or learn items when they are studied a few times spaced over a long time span rather than repeatedly studied in a short span of time (Shaughnessy, 1977). Social media networks such as Twitter provide an opportunity for history instructors to utilize a popular platform to space practice while potentially increasing student interest and concept learning. Distributed Practice and Memory Research regarding distributed practice dates back to studies from as early as the 19th century; studies that focused on practice and its related effect on memory. German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885) conducted early experiments related to spacing effect in practice. He controlled for previous knowledge of words by utilizing nonsense syllables. Among his findings, Ebbinghaus discovered that subjects had greater recall of syllables when their practice was spaced apart in contrast to a massed practice session. Distributed practice (DP) can be defined as “the effect of interstudy interval (ISI) upon learning, as measured on subsequent tests ,” while ISI is the interval separating different study episodes of the same materials (Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted, & Rohrer, p. 354). Cepeda, et. al

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING (2006) also found that “the timing on distributed versus massed practice, may vary based on the research, but the common thread is that spaced or distributed practice has a significantly greater spread of practice than massed practice” (p. 354). In one study, Underwood (1961) determined DP occurred when trial intervals are greater than 15 seconds; massed practice (MP), when intervals are 2-8 seconds. Dempster (1989) found that “spacing effects can best be understood in terms of the ‘accessibility’ hypothesis, and that spaced repetitions have considerable potential for improving classroom learning” (p. 309). The accessibility hypothesis states that memory will be accurate when the ease of accessibility is correlated with memory behavior; however, if the ease of processing is not correlated with memory in a given task, then the judgments will not be accurate (Schwartz, 1994). The theory dates back to studies conducted by Tulving and Pearlstone (1966) that worked with cued recall. Their study demonstrated that subjects who were non-cued had information reach their memory stage but not their retrieval stage in contrast to those who received spaced cues. Studies by (Estes, 1955; Glenberg, 1979; Raaijmakers, 2003; Pavlik and Anderson, 2006) found that by increasing the spacing of practice, subjects had improved recall. Likewise, Bahrick (1979) found that when spacing was moved closer together the recall of subjects worsened. This research suggests that the timing of reviews by instructors should be spaced increasingly further apart to improve performance. Jerome Bruner, who was also a leading researcher of concept learning, was likewise influential in the study of spacing practice. Bruner’s (1960) spiral curriculum was a form of spaced practice in which complex ideas structured to a learner, first at a simplified level, and then re-visited at more complex levels later on. This may also be viewed as a form of scaffolding so that the learner would be taught at

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING gradually increasing difficulty levels (spiral), until they were able to learn on their own. By exposing the learner to pieces of a complex idea Bruner (1960) was essentially spacing practice, but doing so in a more calculated and facilitating way. Studies involving memory were often performed using animal subjects in the late 19th and early 20th century. Prior to Skinner’s operant conditioning theory (1963), Thorndike developed a theory of learning (1911), which included several important findings from his research conducted on animals using puzzles. Among his findings, Thorndike (1911) claimed that the more frequently an association is used, the stronger it becomes. He also created what he termed the Law of Effect, which claimed that, “several responses made to the same situation, those which are accompanied or closely followed by satisfaction to the animal will, other things being equal, be more firmly connected with the situation, so that, when it recurs, they will be more likely to recur; those which are accompanied or closely followed by discomfort to the animal will, other things being equal, have their connections with that situation weakened, so that, when it recurs, they will be less likely to occur. Likewise, the greater the satisfaction or discomfort a subject felt, the greater the strengthening or weakening of the bond” (p.244). Concept Learning Gagne’s Taxonomy Gagne’s taxonomy is one of the most widely known and respected taxonomies in the field of instructional design. Seels and Glassgow (1990) cited its ability to distinguish between abstract and concrete learning as the primary reason for its acclaim. Additionally, Gredler (1997) praised Gagne for shifting research on learning from the laboratory towards a real world setting. Gagne (1972) developed his taxonomy based on five categories of learning outcomes illustrated in Table 2. 28

UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Table 2 Gagne’s Five Learned Capabilities Intellectual Skills

Utilizing discriminations, concepts, and principles to solve problems

Cognitive Strategy

The learner develops metacognitive strategies for problem solving and thinking

Verbal Information

Recalling interconnected facts of knowledge and being able to label specific inputs

Attitude

Focus is placed on the choice to complete an action

Motor Skills

Executing physical behavioral skills in a coordinated manner

Adopted from Gagne, 1972. Gagne (1972) spent time discussing the acquisition of intellectual skills within his taxonomy. While Gagne’s taxonomy categorizes learning as opposed to ranking capabilities in terms of complexity, he created four levels of subcategories to his intellectual skills domain, which are displayed in Figure 1. The subcategories include discrimination, concrete concepts, rule using, and problem solving.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING

Figure 1: Gagne’s Intellectual Skills Domain The lowest level of Gagne’s (1984) intellectual skills domain is discrimination. Discrimination is developing the ability to differentiate a specific feature of an object or symbol from one another. At this level the learner achieves the ability to distinguish differences among various stimuli. A learner must be able to reach this stage to move towards concrete concept formation. Concrete concept formation is a learner’s ability to create classes of object features, objects, and events. While learning a concept, the learner must focus on the relevant features and ignore those that are irrelevant (Bourne, 1982). Concept learning takes place after discrimination occurs. Concrete concepts consist of object features, objects, relational terms, and events. Once a class of objects, object qualities, or relations can be identified by examples of the class, concrete learning has occurred (Gagne & Driscoll, 1988). In addition to identifying a concept, the more difficult piece to concept learning requires a learner to define the concept. Gagne and Driscoll (1988) explained that this would require a learner to identify the components of a concept and also be able to properly provide examples of the concept. In the example of the concept of imperialism, the learner must define imperialism, and then be able to identify the components of imperialism, such as power, dominance, occupation, etc., and then be able to provide specific examples of imperialism. 30

UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Beyond concept learning, a learner develops the skill of rule learning. This is applying a rule to a given situation or condition by responding to a class of inputs with a class of actions. Relating two or more simpler concepts in the particular manner of a rule. A rule states the relationship among concepts (Seels & Glasgow, 1990). The rulemaking stage is also synonymous with developing “if-then” statements. An example of this rule would be as follows: “if you look both ways before crossing the street and see no traffic within a safe distance, then you can safely begin to cross the street.” Once rulemaking is established, the culmination of Gagne’s hierarchy brings a learner to problem solving. This occurs when the learner utilizes all of the skills developed in the lower levels of taxonomy and uses them to solve a never before encountered problem (Gagne & Briggs, 1974). Additional Concept Learning Theories There have been several other noteworthy theories that propose how we learn concepts. Earlier theories of concept learning were behaviorist in nature. Clark Hull was an influential behavioral psychologist from Yale University that elaborated on Pavlov’s laws of conditioning to create what he proposed as the stimulus-response association theory. Hull (1943) explained people learn to associate a particular response or concept to the various stimuli that define that concept. In Hull’s experimentation, subjects received positive feedback for identifying characteristics of a concept. As a result, response strength increased to the attributes characteristics of a concept. Jerome Bruner (Bruner, Goodnow, & Austin, 1967) was an influential constructivist who developed a theory of cognitive development that was a form of hypothesis testing, which essentially involved the creation of categories in order to attain concepts. Bruner (et. al) called concept attainment, "the search for and listing of attributes that can be used to distinguish

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING exemplars from non-exemplars of various categories" (p. 233). Learners are able to use the observed examples and non-examples to create a hypothesis or definition of the concept. Concept attainment differs from concept formation in that concept attainment is a teacher-led method of utilizing language development to facilitate student concept attainment, while concept formation is more of an inductive process that occurs within the learner (Sapra, 2011). Bruner did extensive research on cognitive development, and explained that intelligent minds create from their experiences in “generic coding systems that permit one to go beyond the data to new and possibly fruitful predictions,” (Bruner, 1957, p. 234). In Bruner’s opinion, learning went beyond the obtainment of concepts, towards a level of creativity and intellectualism that came from those lower levels of learning that required exposure to various stimuli. Bruner (1960) argued that “language can code stimuli and free an individual from the constraints of dealing only with appearances, to provide a more complex yet flexible cognition.” Taba (1966) and Joyce and Weil (2000) were among the future theorists who were influenced by the work of Bruner and his colleagues. Taba’s inductive approach to curriculum design later became to be known as the “grassroots approach,” (Ornstein & Hunkins, 2009). Taba’s theories included three key assumptions; thinking can be taught through engaged inductive reason, thinking is an active transaction between the learner and data, and processes of thought evolve in an organized manner Taba. She also identified three skills that are developed by learners; concept formation, data interpretation, and principal application (1962). Joyce and Weil studied both Taba and Bruner in great detail (2000). They utilized Taba’s works and developed nine phases of her approach to learning. The nine phases are grouped within three subsets of what Taba identified as key inductive learning skills; concept formation,

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING interpretation of data, and hypothesizing and forming generalizations. The nine phases of concept learning they developed are shown in Figure 2.

Concept Formation Phase 1: Identifying and listing Phase 2: Grouping according to common attributes Phase 3: Categorizing (labeling of categories) Interpretation of Data Phase 4: Identifying critical relationships (differentiation) Phase 5: Exploring relationships (cause-effect) Phase 6: Making inferences

Application of Principles Phase 7: Predicting consequences Phase 8: Explaining and/or supporting predictions Phase 9: Testing and generalization Figure 2: Taba’s Nine Phases of Inductive Learning as Described by Joyce and Weil (2000) Common errors in the learning of concepts include overgeneralization, undergeneralization, and misconception (Merrill, et al., 1992). Mintzes, Trowbridge, and Aurnaudin (1991) had related findings while working with children on category classifications. Subjects overgeneralized in many cases that all amphibious animals were fish and therefore incorrectly classified seals and dolphins. Tennyson (1973) found conflicting research from (Smoke, 1933; Morrisett & Hovland, 1959, Wooley & Merrill, 1972) on the merits of providing 33

UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING non-examples to assist in concept learning. Parker, (2000) found that non-examples could help students classify concepts. Teaching Concepts Building from Taba’s (1966) model for inductive learning, Joyce and Weil (2000) developed three phases of concept attainment based on the work of Jerome Bruner. The authors developed teaching strategies that accompanied both models. The teaching methods based on the Taba Model involve the teacher asking more open-ended questions that relate to each phase of inductive learning. For example, in phase 9: Testing and Generalization; asking the question: “What would it take to make this principle generally true?” is a way that a teacher could assist the student in reaching that level of inductive thinking. Joyce and Weil (2000) also utilized Bruner’s (Bruner, Goodnow, & Austin, 1967) concept attainment research to create an educational game that they found would aid in inductive thinking. The three-phase game is detailed in Figure 3. There are three phases to the game, but first the teacher chooses the concept before the lesson starts and explains the rules of the game. The goal of this game is for the learner to take small pieces of data and inductively convert them into concepts. Concept Attainment Educational Game Phase I: The teacher presents positive and negative examples of the concept Phase II a.: The teacher tests for attainment of the concept by getting additional examples from the learners Phase II b.: The teacher (or a student) names the concept. Phase III: The teacher analyses the thinking strategies used by the learner to help teach metacognitive thinking skills. Figure 3: Concept Attainment Educational Game as Described by Joyce and Weil (2000)

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Walter Parker, a professor of education at the University of Washington, created a guide for social studies teachers to teach concepts (n.d.). His guide focused on teacher preparation prior to the lesson. Parker’s guidelines call for a teacher to select a concept or concepts, list their critical characteristics, assemble a good set of 3-4 examples of the concept, create a dataorganization chart of the examples, and then assemble a good set 2-3 of non-examples. Parker explained that “a non-example should “help students classify’… and has some, but not all, of the critical characteristics that define the concept (n.d, para. 4).” The next phase of teaching concepts in a social studies class according to Parker is facilitation from the teacher. To begin that process, the teacher should attempt to build interest through either current events or something relevant to the students in the classroom that is related to the concept. Once some initial classroom engagement has occurred, the teacher should assess the previous knowledge of the concept. This could potentially be done through a formal pre-test or informally through some verbal questioning. After the students study examples of the concept, Parker advises the teacher to utilize a blank data-organization chart to compile attributes and pertinent information of each example provided. Next, students should be asked to identify similarities and differences within concept examples and non-examples, before summarizing concepts to create a definition for each concept. Finally, Parker explains that an application activity should be used to assess students, by using new examples and non-examples of a concept that they have never seen before and have them classify the examples accordingly. Problem-Based Learning Problem-based learning (PBL) is a student-centered instructional methodology that intends to develop learning within a subject area through problem solving. Howard Barrows and his colleagues at McMaster University Medical School initially implemented this pedagogy

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING into medical school education. Barrows’ (1986) taxonomy of problem-based learning consisted of six characteristics: 1. Learning is student centered. 2. Learning occurs in small student groups. 3. Teachers are facilitators or guides. 4. Problems form the original focus and stimulus for learning. 5. Problems are a vehicle for the development of clinical problem solving skills. 6. New information is acquired through self-directed learning. Problem-based learning traces its roots back to the constructivist learning theory. Savery and Duffy (1995) described these underpinnings by four key characteristics of constructivism evident in PBL; learners as constructors of their own knowledge, puzzlement being a stimulant and organizer for learning, knowledge is socially negotiated, and faculty as consultants and cognitive models to support scaffolding. Extensive research has pointed to Vygotsky’s (1978) theory of zone of proximal development (ZPD) as a theoretical groundwork for PBL (Loftus & Higgs, 2005; Harland, 2003; Hung, 2002). Vygotsky’s (1978) theory states “that every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (inter-psychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals" (p. 57). ZPD essentially develops a scale that focuses on what a student can’t do, what a student can do with help, and what a student can do without help. ZPD also ties closely to the concept of scaffolding, which was defined by Wood, Bruner, and Ross (1976, p. 90) as an “adult controlling

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING those elements of the task that are essentially beyond the learner's capacity, thus permitting him to concentrate upon and complete only those elements that are within his range of competence.” All of these elements are found in problem-based learning and hold an even greater significance when technology is incorporated into the lesson. Lin, Hoffman and Borengasser (2013) found that Twitter is a student centered mobile learning technology that requires a focus on “scaffolding and modeling” by an instructor when implementing into a classroom. This would lead one to reason that Twitter may serve as a utility for problem-based learning. History Education and Active Learning With emphasis in schools on standardized testing scores and common core subjects of math, language arts, and science, history as a subject area is in danger of being deemphasized by curriculum reformers (Wrenn, 2010). Therefore it is imperative for teachers to move beyond the textbook-worksheet-recitation model that is prevalent in traditional social studies education (Grant 2003). In addition to lesson plans, history teachers must strive to differentiate their student assessments. Breakstone, Smith, and Wineburg (2013) found that there are often multiple interpretations that a student could provide that may challenge the "correct" answer in multiple-choice testing, yet social studies in particular are prone to using multiple choice tests. Despite these challenges, Yilmaz’s (2008) research has shown there are various methods that may be used to create active and dynamic history curriculum. Yilmaz (2008) examined the dichotomy of history as both a science and an art. She took the stance that history was more artlike by stating: “I see history more as an art than as a science in that history has a lot more to do with art than science in terms of the way the historian reconstructs or interprets historical events. 37

UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING The past itself or historical data do not have meaning in themselves. The past is composed of countless numbers of disconnected historical facts. As such, it is formless and gains meaning and form only through the historian’s ability to imagine and to see the past events and situations from the viewpoints of historical agents” (p. 38). By the same token, inquiry based learning poses an opportunity for students to develop inquisitive thinking skills in the realm of social studies and history. Arnold (2010) created a 7step process for inquiry learning that includes the following principles: engage, tune in, hypothesize, structure an inquiry, critically examine evidence, reach a conclusion, reflect and apply. The summarized model basically states that students learn by doing. One example of this type of activity tasked students to act out their daily lives as if they were a family at home during World War I (2010, p. 21). This type of endeavor provokes a more concentrated level of reflection than merely memorizing a series of chronological facts. It also builds a level of empathy that can be applied toward current events to synthesize life in a war torn country today. Bage (1999) discussed the importance of narrative storytelling in history education to develop a reconstruct past events and initiate powerful learning. Similarly Hexter (1971) argued that narrative storytelling was important due to way history had typically been taught from secondary sources. He went on to explore shortcomings of both “first record” interpretations, which were original items or sources from history, and “second record,” which is essentially historical information that has been processed and passed along or internalized. By utilizing original documents and artifacts, students can be empowered to develop their own interpretations rather than taking an author’s analysis as certainty. Benes and Steinbrink (1998) created lesson plans in history that focused on the appreciation of heroes, which they found engaged students. The concept of heroes is one that 38

UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING students are able to relate to at any point in history. By linking concepts from the past to something they can relate to in present times, students will feel more connected to the subject. This type of pursuit could also potentially be altered to allow students to report on heroes through tweeting. Recreating history is another way to effectively bring a lesson to life. Brice and Catania’s (2012) study showed how one teacher utilized experimental history to fill a gap created by a lack of original sources in the subject being studied. In this particular example, the teacher had the class build a model of a trebuchet (a type of catapult that was used as a siege engine in the Middle Ages) to better simulate the warfare of the time period being studied. This experimental archeological study demonstrated that recreating history could provide enhanced learning. Historical reenactment is one instructional delivery method that has been met with significant criticism, despite having a potential place in the classroom. Collingsworth (1936) stated that “the history of thought, and therefore all of history, is the reenactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind” (p. 169). Reenactments require students to gain a deep understanding of the historical events due to the detailed nature of a reenactment. Morris (2008) showed that utilizing a time period less covered in textbooks makes for a better subject of a classroom reenactment due to the extra processing required. Mattson (2005) felt that “historical reenactments too frequently focused on entertainment over veracity” (p. 69). Additionally, Agnew (2007) found that while reenactments may have the potential to emancipate and create social change, the possibility exists for inaccuracies and confusion for students. Dramatic historical fiction has also been proven to provide enriched engagement in students. After developing a script and acting out historical events, students were more engaged and a

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING deeper discussion was prompted (Snelson, H., Lingard, R., & Brennan, K., 2012). Additionally, video game designers have created historical reenactment games that place the player in a setting that appears aesthetically similar to historical events (Rejack, 2007). Correspondingly, an opportunity exists to utilize reenactment in a technological model through social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter. Incorporating Technology into the Classroom Technology provides an opportunity for active learning in history education. Bates (2008) focused on working with pre-service teachers to implement technology into social studies education. The study found that despite the fact that there are some inherent operational challenges in integrating inquiry-based technology into social studies education; the quality of work produced by students was exceptional. Modeling a storyboard through technology was found to be an effective way to provide students with scaffolding to develop an original historical narrative (Saye and Brush, 2002). Regardless of the educational level, instructors must be familiar with the technology they plan on utilizing for class and be capable of demonstrating it to their class. Rinaldo, Tapp, and Laverie (2011) interviewed undergraduate marketing students about their barriers towards utilizing Twitter in a classroom setting. They found that the most common hesitation for students was that they were anxious about using a new technology. This is an important factor to consider when implementing Twitter or similar technology into a lesson plan. Despite the connotation of young people as being tech savvy, social media consumers, basic technological literacy can’t be taken for granted. Drawing inspiration from Bloom’s Taxonomy of Cognitive Domain, Tomei (2005) developed Taxonomy for Technology Domain, in an effort to assist instructors with the

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING implementation of technology into the classroom. His taxonomy is a six level interconnected model that moves from lowest level, literacy to collaboration, decision-making, learning, teaching, and the top level of tech-ology. Tech-ology is a leadership role in technology that addresses inequities and develops plans and policy. It is important for teachers to at least bring students past the literacy stage assuming they start out without any prior knowledge. Once they have general understanding of that technology, instructors should strive to move them into those stages of collaboration and at least decision-making. The ability to reach a decision-making level of thinking, without technological interference is essential if inquiry learning is to take place. The Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education (Chickering, Gamson, & Poulsen, 1987) created a framework for best practices in higher education by focusing on student engagement through active learning, ongoing communication, cooperative learning, and varied instructional methodology among other pillars. Chickering and Ehrmann (1996) later went on to create a plan for implementing the seven principles within an online setting. Likewise, student-faculty engagement through prompt, ongoing communication, and collaboration were keys to making an online setting successful. Social media appears to provide an opportunity to leverage the ability to communicate beyond classroom hours for more frequent feedback and both informal and formal collaboration. Computer-Mediated Communication Effective online communication should be considered when developing a lesson plan that focuses on the implementation of Twitter. Computer-mediated communication has evolved over time from email and instant messaging to social media (McQuaid, 2010). Walther (1996) developed the theory of hyperpersonal communication, which stated “that computer-mediated

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING communication exceeded face-to-face communication, because a hyperpersonal message sender has a greater ability to strategically develop and edit self-presentation, enabling a selective and optimized presentation of one's self to other. He and Tidwell later (2002) introduced the concept of social information processing theory (SIP), which explained how people were able to able to build and maintain relationships online without the non-verbal cues that typically accompany face-to-face contact through their desire for social relationships. Despite the lack of social cues that are inherently absent from the written tweet, Twitter has developed internal functions for other media such as photos, videos, and links that can be shared to further enhance communication. Integrated social networks such as Instagram provide users the opportunity to post enhanced photos. YouTube provides the opportunity to share a broad library of videos, and Vine provides users the functionality to provide short, 6-second maximum-length video clips that can be inserted directly into a tweet. Garcia and Jacobs (1999) research found that paralinguistic icons such as emoticons are able to help users to better express emotion or sarcasm within their Internet communication. Communication through Twitter Twitter has been used for a variety of reasons, but following celebrities and live updating of events are among the most widely used. Avid Twitter advocate, R. John Locke, the Director of Student Activities and Leadership at Robert Morris University in Moon Township, PA, also serves as an adjunct professor of Communication at the University. Locke requires students in his professional writing class to create a Twitter account to learn the importance of efficient communication and to be able to analyze how public figures communicate through social media. Locke candidly explains the difference between Facebook and Twitter, “Facebook is a place where you collect people, and I look at Twitter more as a ‘celebrity petting zoo.’ There is no

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING other platform like Twitter, where you can get into the thoughts and minds of celebrities in real time (2013).” Celebrity profiles have been both enhanced and detracted from as a result of comments made on Twitter. Celebrities have gone as far as having marketing agencies or consultants handle their Twitter accounts. As Marwick and Boyd (2011) explained: “Twitter creates a new expectation of intimacy. Rather than handing off fan management to an agent or fan club, celebrity practitioners must expend emotional labor maintaining a network of affective ties with their followers. Thus, even the famous must learn the techniques used by ‘regular people’ to gain status and attention online. Twitter demonstrates the transformation of ‘celebrity’ from a personal quality linked to fame to a set of practices that circulate through modern social media” (p. 315). In addition to celebrity and business Twitter profiles; the concept of micro-celebrities has also come about as a result of social media. Even “ordinary people” have taken advantage of using hash tags to participate in searchable discussion that creates traffic to their Twitter accounts, and therefore an increase in Twitter followers (Page, 2012). This type of calculated communication demonstrates the power of the hashtag in addition to the mentality of many Twitter users who utilize Twitter as a tool for social prosperity. Twitter has created viral, live-time fan interaction for major events across the world. It becomes “an unofficial extension of an event, through which audiences can engage in direct, many-to-many communication, conversing, and connecting with other fans around the world. (Highfield, Harrington, & Bruns, 2013). Likewise, Twitter can be used as a tool to report news digitally. Vis (2013) explained the need for recent tools that have been developed to verify that breaking news is accurate, especially in times of crisis when communication is most difficult. In 43

UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING the most extreme cases, Twitter can help create political change or influence the outcomes of elections or public policy. A number of protestors of a repressive regime in Iran took to Twitter during their 2009 elections to protest and try to organize opposition, only to pay for it with their lives (Burns & Eltham, 2009). Since social media communication has been influential in the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions in 2011, people across the world have taken note of key influential social media behavior and a “learning effect” has occurred (Lotan, Graeff, Ananny, Gaeffney, Pearce, & Boyd, 2011). This learning effect can influence change in organizations of all kinds. Because of the power of Twitter, the behavior of news correspondents on Twitter becomes imperative to create accurate reporting. During the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State University, journalists blurred the lines between personal and professional communication by sharing more opinion and criticism at other Twitter users than actual facts about the case (Sanderson & Hambrick, 2012). When personal communication becomes a part of the discourse from trusted figures, it creates a challenge for Twitter users to disseminate truth from opinion. While live event tweeting remains a vital function of Twitter, the reactions of the Twitter community are likewise important. Bruns and Stieglitz (n.d.) analyzed Twitter usage during major international events such as the British royal wedding and the 2010 Australian federal election. By using metrics involving hash tags, links shared, re-tweets, and tagged posts; they were able to pinpoint the most discussed topics in the world down to the minute. This type of analysis has value not only in business or industry, but also in incorporating current events into the classroom.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Twitter in the Classroom Opponents of online learning often cite the lack of social interaction that takes place in comparison a face-to-face classroom. Developers created programs such as Mixable, FinalsClub, OpenStudy, to increase the socialization of online education while enhancing information sharing (Parry & Young, 2010). Despite these specialized programs, there would appear to still be a void in the amount of personalized communication that exists online in relationship to a brick and mortar classroom. Dunlap and Lowenthal (2010) suggested that digital storytelling was an effective way to bridge the gap in online learning. This creates a more personalized and authentic experience for students. As the most widely recognized microblogging tool in the world, Twitter provides a natural forum for storytelling and many other creative instructional opportunities for instructors (Ebner, Lienhardt, Rohns, & Meyer; 2010). While significant literature exists on Twitter and its use in education, there is limited research available that provides experimental evidence of long-term effects on academic achievement as a result of Twitter usage. Twitter provides more fluid, natural dialogue between participants than discussion boards or email (Dunlap & Lowenthal, 2009). Despite no significant differences in achievement scores between Twitter users and non-users in their study, Smith and Tirumala (2012) found that Twitter users were able to find greater social comfort. This might be attributed to a number of factors, chiefly that a user can passively follow content on Twitter, and all of the content within a conversation is visible. Teachers typically will vary on their openness towards utilizing social media based on subject area with more technical subjects likely to utilize Twitter than those that are not. The faculty members themselves also play a major role in the decision to utilize Twitter in a classroom. Cao and Hong (2011) developed categories for five faculty types in relation to social

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING media use: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards and objectors. Each group differed in their ability or eagerness to utilize social media based primarily on the personality of the faculty member. Cao and Hong’s (2011) categories were a spinoff of Everett Rogers diffusion of innovations theory first published in 1962. This theory creates reasoning for the type and speed of technological changes in cultures. Rogers (1995) describes diffusion as "the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system" (p. 5). Likewise Rogers (1995) defines the innovation-decision process as “the process through which an individual (or other decision-making unit) passes from first knowledge of an innovation, to forming an attitude toward the innovation, to a decision to adopt or reject, to implementation of the new idea, and to confirmation of this decision"(p. 20). There are wide arrays of benefits to using Twitter in education. Professional exposure, engaging with practitioners, polling, timely and on-going connections, and back-channeling information are among the most valuable (Dunlap & Lowenthal, 2009). The 140-character limitation of Twitter actually creates advantages for instructors by forcing students to write concisely. This unique feature and character function differences such as hashtags and tagging are features that had long differentiated Twitter from Facebook, until recent changes from the social media giant that include tagging using the “@” symbol and hashtags; modifications clearly designed to mimic Twitter. Studies have been done using Twitter in nursing and medical education, but their methodology appears to have practicality in any subject area. Mistry (2011) found that using Twitter as a teaching tool created reinforcement to in-class learning and enabled document sharing through Twitter links. One study utilized Twitter as a classroom response system;

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING instructors used lived Twitter responses from students in the class to project onto a screen in front of the room (Paul & Ianitti, 2012). Despite some mixed reviews from participants that suggested it felt awkward to not just answer questions verbally, instructor felt Twitter enhanced classroom discussion and provided introverted students with more of an opportunity to engage more in class discussion. Twitter can help create richer conversation that can be extended beyond the time constraints of a typical classroom (Grosseck & Holotescu, 2008). Subsequently, students are embedded in a more satisfying social experience. One study found that students who utilized Twitter in a college first year seminar class were more interactive with faculty and classmates, while adjusting more easily to college than those who were not (Junco, Heiberger, & Loken, 2011). The 24/7 extended classroom discussion capabilities of Twitter are perhaps its most valuable asset from an educational perspective. Twitter in History Education Limited research exists on using Twitter in a history classroom at any educational level. In 2009 a grant funded project called TwHistory was developed by a team led by Marion Jensen, then a graduate student at Utah State University, to encourage historical reenactments through Twitter. This endeavor was based around the concept of choosing a well-documented historical event, choosing key figures from the event, and then tweeting chronologically as the historical figures based on original source documents. One case study found that a teacher who utilized TwHistory was effectively about to serve as a facilitator within a problem-based learning environment (Lee, Shelton, Walker, Caswell, & Jensen; 2012). Despite a current lack of activity on the site (2014), the tools are in place to provide classroom teachers with a template to create original reenactments, or to simply share past reenactment material with their classes.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING In the problem-centered reenactment based learning of TwHistory, learners are primarily self-directed, with the teacher serving as a leader or assistant to the students. Consequently, it is important to develop some accountability from the students up front. Valjataga and Fiedler (2009) found that developing personal learning contracts (PLC) were essential in any selfdirected learning activity involving social media. Not only is this helpful in terms of productivity, but it also could be supportive of a moral and ethical environment. In an activity similar to Twitter reenactments, Volk (2013) recounted a class assignment at Oberlin College where a professor required his class to utilize avatars or characters from a historical event and keep a blog as that character. This created a depth of knowledge and more authentic experience for students than simply recounting facts. Likewise the same concept could also be potentially modified to Twitter, so that students could tweet as if they were an “ordinary person” experiencing some historical phenomenon. Twitter has also been used to prompt classroom discussion. One middle school teacher archived tweets and would attempt to find interesting or controversial tweets to entice the class into a debate (Shein, 2012). The “hidden curriculum” in this example is that students are able to learn about the importance of self-monitoring their behavior on social media. If the instructor is able to go back and find old controversy rousing tweets, it repeats the message to them that everything you share on Twitter is permanent. Rather than utilizing Twitter for creative purposes, some instructors choose to use it for more practical reasons. One instructor utilized Twitter to post homework assignments and shared the account information with parents and guardians of students within the class so that they are aware of what their child needed to complete (Risinger, 2008). This type of communication creates transparency and broadens communication between student, teacher, and

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING parent. By inviting parents to use Twitter and sharing some brief instructions on the technology, it would appear to help them better understand social media and may enable them to overcome their preconceptions about the social network. Potential Pitfalls of Twitter in Education While success stories for using Twitter exist, it is important to understand what caused them to work well, and what hazards are necessary to avoid. Some of the statistics on Twitter usage that are available are misleading. Boyd and Crawford’s (2012) study found the following: “Twitter does not represent ‘all people’, and it is an error to assume ‘people’ and ‘Twitter users’ are synonymous: they are a very particular sub-set. Neither is the population using Twitter representative of the global population. Nor can we assume that accounts and users are equivalent. Some users have multiple accounts, while multiple people use some accounts. Some people never establish an account, and simply access Twitter via the web. Some accounts are ‘bots’ that produce automated content without directly involving a person” (pp. 12-13). While re-tweeting provides affirmation and social interaction between users, it has a tendency to present misinterpretations. Because re-tweets include the original user’s handle, the 140-character limit becomes compromised. As a result of character limitations re-tweets are often performed through the perception of the audience, which has the tendency to adapt the original meaning of a tweet (Boyd, Golder & Lotan, 2010). Consequently it is important to hold classroom discussion related that incorporates Twitter feedback, so the communication remains transparent. Much like in a traditional classroom setting, alpha personalities develop and inequities exist in Twitter communication. The top 10% of Twitter users make up 90% of the content

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING produced on the site, with the median Twitter user only tweeting once (Heil & Pikorsky, 2009). A study from Heil and Piskorsky (2009) also found that the average man is twice as likely to follow another man and likewise a woman is 25% more likely to follow a man on Twitter, despite a similar number of users by gender. Heil and Piskorsky (2010) also found that women produced the majority of content on Twitter. One of the major issues many people consider to be a problem with social media or online learning in general is that there is no face-to-face contact and therefore a potential for less engagement for students. Chen, Lambert, and Guidry (2010) found that participants in their study that utilized online learning had enhanced engagement over those students that participated in a traditional face-to-face setting. Interviewees found that they were able to share information online at their own convenience. Likewise, this is an inherent advantage of Twitter, as users can share information as frequently or infrequently as the feel, and at any time of the day. As stated previously in an example about reporting the news, communication on Twitter has a tendency to alternate between personal and professional, which often leads to distortion. Kieslinger, Ebner, and Wiesenhofer (2011) found that scientists in their study utilized personal communication of a private nature approximately 1/3 of the time while using Twitter as an elearning supplement. Depending on the level of experience and maturity of potential participants, this number could increase drastically. Among the issues that Dhir, Buragga, & Boreqqah (2013) found with Twitter as a classroom tool were that it could be addictive and distracting, while causing students to waste time that they could potentially be on task. One could argue that students may already be spending significant time on Twitter without any prompting by teachers to incorporate it into class. Another side effect of students utilizing the tool frequently is that they will inevitable

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING become familiar with its functions and become more efficient at using it for whatever purpose they choose. In a case study conducted by Lin, Hoffman, and Borengasser (2013), students initially utilized Twitter frequently as a supplemental communication tool, but tapered off as the semester continued. The missing component in this type of situation is the role of the instructor. It is essential that the instructor not only establishes a purpose for using Twitter, but also models the behavior that he or she would like to see the class exhibit. Scaffolding is not only done at the beginning of Twitter implementation, but it should be done intermittently when it is identified as necessary. Scaffolding refers to a variety of instructional techniques used to move students progressively towards stronger understanding and, ultimately greater independence in the learning process. In a worst-case scenario, student privacy may be invaded or they may become prey for sexual predators while using social media. In a one year study conducted by the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, an estimated 2,322 arrests were made for sex crimes against minors that were initiated using social networks (Wolak, Finkelhor, & Mitchell, 2010). That figure does not include the number of crimes that went unreported or undetected. Due to the lack of security inherent in any social network, it is important for a teacher to become familiar with privacy settings and to train their students accordingly. Legal Issues in Social Media There are well-documented cases that have reached the media of teachers jeopardizing their jobs due to improper social media use. In one case, a 24-year old Georgia public school teacher named Ashley Payne was enjoying a European vacation like many others would; taking sightseeing tours, visiting cafes, restaurants, and shops. Payne also did something common to

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING the more than 728 million daily active Facebook users worldwide upon returning home: she posted photos to her Facebook page documenting her trip (PRNewswire, 2013). Among the slew of photographs Payne posted, there was a photo of her at the Guinness beer factory, holding a glass of wine in one hand and a beer in the other. This photo would eventually be the target of scrutiny by the administration at her school district, and prompt her principal to leave her with an ultimatum to resign or face immediate suspension (Eckes, 2013). The principal encouraged her to resign in their discussion, stating that if she were to be suspended, she would likely lose her teaching license in the state of Georgia (Downey, 2011). Payne sought legal action against her school district after they eventually refused to reinstate her. Her attorney filed a writ of mandamus alleging that the Georgia Fair Dismissal Act entitled Payne to a hearing and appropriate compensation. The state court judge held that by resigning she was not protected under the act, and the case is now under appeal (Oppenheim, 2013 Payne v. Barrow County School District, 2009). In Payne’s case, she shared personal photos on her Facebook profile and an anonymous emailer tipped off the school towards her actions. Because the nature of her offense may be seen as harmless to many, it gained national media attention in 2009. Other similar cases have arisen and in some cases the teachers involved haven’t provided consent for the material posted. Despite the lack of consent in terms of material being posted on a social network, any controversial or inappropriate material posted on a teacher’s behalf may put their job in jeopardy. An example of a case where consent came into play occurred at a Pennsylvania school district in 2009. A female teacher named hosted a bachelorette party for another teacher that included male strippers as part of the entertainment. Photos were posted on another individual’s Facebook account in which the aforementioned teacher was visible at the party, thus she was the

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING lone teacher identified, and later put on a 30-day suspension. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Pennsylvania threatened a lawsuit on the teacher-in-question’s behalf during her suspension and the school district quickly settled, paying her back pay for time missed, as well as $10,000 to avoid litigation, in addition to expunging her record of the incident (ACLU, 2010, D’Amico v. Brownsville Area School District, 2010). A similar incident took place took place in 2007 in which school administrators at a Virginia school district were made aware of a video posted on YouTube which featured a district art teacher. In the video, the teacher “discussed and demonstrated his artistic technique of painting with his buttocks while wearing a thong style swimsuit (Fulmer, 2010, Murmer v. Chesterfield County School Board, 2007).” Despite the teacher not post the video himself, and using an alias, he was still dismissed by Chesterfield County due to the video’s contents. After the ACLU of Virginia filed a complaint on his behalf, the teacher reached a settlement with the school board for $65,000, which was essentially two years’ salary. In this case, the First Amendment right to freedom of speech is a point of contention. The first amendment to the U.S. Constitution states the following: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. The case involves a teacher’s ability to express himself in an unrelated capacity to his position, versus the school’s perception that his behavior was conduct unbecoming of a teacher and a distraction to the school. Because this case was never heard in court, both sides recognized that reaching a settlement was most appropriate. In all of these cases, the biggest contention is the employee’s rights to how they are able to behave outside of work.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING There are several well-known cases that have created legal precedent for cases that involve employee’s inappropriate behavior outside of work. In Pickering v Board of Education a teacher wrote a letter that was published in a newspaper, which questioned the spending of the school where he worked. The Supreme Court ruled that Pickering had access to information that was available to the public and by writing the letter as a citizen; he was protected to his freedom of speech under the First Amendment. The Supreme Court stated the following: “a public employee does not relinquish First Amendment rights to comment on matters of public interest by virtue of government employment.” They also recognized that “the State's interests as an employer in regulating the speech of its employees differ significantly from those it possesses in connection with regulation of the speech of the citizenry in general" (n.d., sec. II). In later cases such as Connick v Myers and Garcetti v Ceballos, the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment does not protect an employee if their speech is job related or is not a matter of public concern. The Supreme Court has never specifically dealt with a case regarding teacher speech in social media, but the lower courts have faced the issue (DiMarzo, 2012). DiMarzo (2012) cited two related case where teacher social media speech went to trial in lower courts. In Spanierman v Hughes, et. al, a public school teacher was terminated due to communication on his MySpace page that school administration viewed as inappropriate. Among the content deemed inappropriate, the teacher had various conversations with students involving their romantic lives. Using the logic laid forth in Connick, the court ruled that this type of conversation was not a public concern and therefore not protected speech. In Snyder v Millersville University, the judge sided with a university when they denied a student teaching candidate her degree in education due to inappropriate information posted on her MySpace page, which included a drunken photograph of herself and some derogatory

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING language about her host teacher (Lipka, 2008). In this case, as in Spaniermen, the court ruled that her speech was not a matter of public concern. The judge, stating that she was “more teacher than student” (Snyder v. Millersville, 2008), brought up that Snyder had also received negative performance reviews, which hurt her case. Student Privacy Paradox Teachers are not the only entity within the education system that is at risk due to their social media use. Students everywhere post improper information without understanding the public nature of the information that they are sharing. Bahrampour and Aratani (2006) found examples of girls who have “blogged about weekends of drinking and debauchery, while in reality they were coloring with their younger siblings or watching old movies with Grandma” (para. 37). They attributed this to the pressure that teenagers feel to post risqué things, even if they aren’t doing them. While this has become too common, it can have potentially negative effects in terms of their future college and career prospects. College administration and admissions offices have utilized social networks as a way to monitor current and future students. Barnes (2006) found that admissions offices are legally able to view social media from prospective students, but cannot legally “screen out applicants based on race or ethnicity” (p. 34). One Kaplan (Schaffer & Wong, 2012) study found that 87% of colleges use Facebook to recruit students; 76% use Twitter; and 73% use YouTube. Despite these findings, high school students have found themselves in court related to social media communications. In one such example, a student made comments about his principal on his MySpace account, which the school felt were “vulgar, defamatory, and plainly offensive school-related speech (Cain & Fink, 2010, Layshock v Hermitage School District, 2007),” prompting the school to suspend him and move him to an alternative school for 10 days.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING The court later ruled that this ruling from the school violated his constitutional right to free speech and ordered that he be returned to his regular school. Navigating Social Media in Education While social media has some possible hazards, it can still be an extremely useful tool in education if utilized properly. Social media is the most popular online activity in the world ("It’s a social," 2011), and students, teachers, and other educational stakeholders will make use of it for the foreseeable future. One may ask, “Could schools just ban students and educators from utilizing social media?” According to DiMarzo (2012), that would be unconstitutional on a number of levels. Her two primary arguments are that banning teacher-student electronic communication would be facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment over breadth doctrine, while also failing the immediate scrutiny test. These electronic forms of communication have a much broader scope than some of the illicit behavior that has occurred through social media. The cutting of electronic communication between students and teachers would not only prevent negative communication from occurring, but it would bar essential communication that would disrupt the educational process. An additional avenue schools and companies may choose to limit social media interaction between students and teachers is to create a firewall that prevents usage of the sites while on campus or in schools. McKenzie and Farrant (2011) explain that this can easily be curtailed by employees and students utilizing their mobile devices to avoid the firewall, and in turn, escaping the monitoring of organizational IT departments. In fact, statistics show that approximately 200 million people utilize Facebook through strictly mobile technology (Social Media Today, 2013). Beyond schools, public policy changes are another way that governing bodies have tried to prevent inappropriate student-teacher interaction via social media. Governor Jay Nixon of

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Missouri signed a law in 2011 that forbade teachers from “friending” students on Facebook (Hartman, 2011). This law, Senate Bill 54 (2011), also known as the Amy Hester Act, stated that, “School boards (must) develop a written policy concerning teacher-student communication and employee-student communications. Each policy must include appropriate oral and nonverbal personal communication, which may be combined with sexual harassment policies, and appropriate use of electronic media as described in the act, including social networking sites." "Teachers cannot establish, maintain, or use a work-related website unless it is available to school administrators and the child's legal custodian, physical custodian, or legal guardian. Teachers also cannot have a non-workrelated website that allows exclusive access with a current or former student” (para. 2). The law was eventually repealed the law following an injunction from a county judge on behalf of the Missouri State Teachers Association (MSTA) who stated “the breadth of the prohibition is staggering" and the law "would have a chilling effect" on free-speech rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution (Akiti, 2012). While much of the communication that occurs under social media does not fall under legal scrutiny, it is important for all parties within an educational environment to understand the potential ramifications of improper use. It is important for schools to educate teachers, administrators, students, and their families on the dangers of social media. Most of the aforementioned legal issues that result from social media are due to inappropriate public communication via social media. People of all ages and experience levels with technology understand that when they share information on a social network it is similar to any other type of communication conducted in a public forum.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING While the First Amendment protects the freedom of speech, there are some types of speech that are not protected. McKenzie & Farrant (2011) provide two informal ways for companies to determine whether an employee should be fired or disciplined for social media activities: 1) If your company has a social media policy prohibiting certain postings and the employee's postings nonetheless cast the company, its management or its customers in a negative light. 2) If the company's trade secrets and strategy are being discussed anywhere outside the secure confines of your enterprise. It is therefore important for schools and companies to create a policy or best practices for social media, not only for training purposes, but for disciplinary purposes as well. Having a policy or guidelines in place can be important for an organization should litigation occur. Regardless of the scope of any policy, if social media is ignored or not addressed, an organization could be putting itself at increased risk for lawsuits or inappropriate behavior through social media. Conclusion While Twitter is a relatively new technology (2007), its utilization in the classroom is rooted in communication and educational theory from the past. Using Twitter in a secondary education or college history class in most instances will require a problem-centered learning environment where students are self-motivated to move the discussion forward. Thus it is essential for an instructor to take the time to train students on the basics of Twitter and continue to model best practices for their students. Assuming students are familiar

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING with the technology will set them set up for failure, because they won’t have moved beyond literacy towards a level of learning and understanding. In borrowing from both Spitzer’s (1939) spaced repetition theory and the TwHistory concept, the possibility exists to create a "textbook companion" Twitter module that would include pre-created tweets with examples, non-examples, and attributes of key concepts from chapters within a classroom textbook. These tweets would serve as reinforcement to the classroom lesson by sharing short strings of related terms, figures, and places, which represent concepts from the lesson. Studies from Brice and Catania (2012), Collingsworth (1936), and Morris (2008) have shown that active learning projects such as historical reenactment and lessons involving heroes have engaged students and created rich dialogue in the classroom. Since significant research on the TwHistory project and similar uses of Twitter in history education do not exist, there is an opportunity for further research involving its application in the classroom. Despite some of the inherent dangers of improper social media use, it is a technology with so much merit in the classroom that it shouldn’t be avoided. The key to a successful Twitter implementation into any class would appear the quality of training from the teacher. It is crucial to develop guidelines for proper usage and to build awareness about the innate hazards of improper social media use. By scaffolding and modeling proper usage, students should gain a better understanding of how the technology is used. Still not convinced Twitter has a place in education, ask John McGee whom the Pennsylvania Association of Elementary & Secondary School Principals named Assistant Principal of the Year in 2011:

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING I had a professor in my doctoral program that required us to create a Twitter account and maintain a dialogue throughout the semester with my classmates. It changed my outlook completely. I now talk frequently with our faculty about how we can use new technologies such as Twitter to reach our students where they feel most comfortable. The review of literature from Chapter II will serve as the framework for the methodology for this study in Chapter III. As the majority of educational Twitter studies have been qualitative in nature, an opportunity existed to add to the existing literature by including a quantitative component. The following chapter will introduce a design of the study, describe the participants, data collection instruments, and procedures that were followed during the study.

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CHAPTER III: METHODOLOGY Design of Study The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to determine the effect of utilizing Twitter for concept learning in an introductory college history course. The quantitative portion of this study utilized a control group pretest-posttest design with two randomly assigned groups. A convenience sample was utilized due to accessibility issues. The control group received a traditional worksheet review for their test on concepts, while the experimental group received daily tweets that attempted to reinforce key concepts and provide both examples and nonexamples of those concepts. The decision to use a quantitative component was made based on the distinct lack of quantitative studies that utilize Twitter as an instructional tool. The existing literature regarding Twitter in education consists mostly of guidelines for best practices (Joosten, 2012; Dunlap & Lowenthal, 2009, Grosseck & Holotescu, 2008, et.al), or focused on social interaction and student engagement (Trueman & Miles, 2011; Paul & Ianitti, 2012; Junco, Heiberger, & Loken, 2011, et al.). This chapter provides a detailed account of the methodology that was utilized in this study including participants, class descriptions, data collection instruments, procedures, and analysis. Participants The participants in this experiment were 20 college students from a private university in southwestern Pennsylvania. All of the students are enrolled in a course called History 1200 United States History II. The course is part of the University core curriculum required for graduation. At the time of the study, the university had a student to faculty ratio of 15:1 and an average class size of 21:6. The university has approximately 5,413 (4,468 undergraduate, 945 61

UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING graduate) enrolled in the year of the study. The university student population is 53% male, 47% female, from 37 states and 37 nations. 80% of students are Caucasian, 7% black or African American, 4% non-resident alien, 2% Hispanic or Latino, 1% Asian, and the remaining 6% are unknown or two or more races reported (“Big future: By,”). The class consisted of students who registered for the introductory course as part of their graduation requirement. The classroom will be set up in a lecture hall format with seating up to approximately 50 people. All of the students in this study were from the same section, which is held from 2:00 p.m. - 3:15 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the duration of the spring semester (1/13/13 - 05/03/13). The course typically averages approximately 48 students per term, but during this term only had 23 students. One faculty member administered posttest assessments in the same classroom and setting. The instructor is a 38-year old Caucasian male with a PhD in History and 9 years of collegiate teaching experience. This was the instructor’s first experience with using Twitter in the classroom; however, he had personal experience utilizing Twitter and other social media. The instructor will be interviewed and asked to keep a journal for a daily record of events. The researcher created the tweets, and pre-scheduled them through Hootesuite and synchronized with the material taught in class. The instructor validated all tweets for accuracy prior to their publication. Class Descriptions The group that receives a traditional review consisted of 10 students. The experimental group that received the Twitter treatment also consisted of 10 students. The instructor randomly assigned students to either a Twitter review group or a review worksheet group.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Data Collection Instruments The instructor who is implementing this study into his course designed the test instrument that was used in this study. His standard unit exam includes 15 multiple choice questions, 10 true/false questions, 10 matching questions, 5 fill-in-the-blank questions, and one essay question that is worth 20 points. The students had an opportunity to choose from one of two essay questions. The section with 15-multiple choice questions served as the instrument for data collection from within the exam and was considered the posttest (see Appendix B). The questions tested both concrete and abstract concepts that were identified by the host faculty member. As a pre-test students’ scores from the first unit exam were compared to determine if any significant variation in the groups existed. The concepts from the pre-test come from a study guide used for review of the previous unit (see Appendix C). Pretest questions were similar in format and content to the posttest questions provided in Appendix B. Due to the relatively small sample size, the pre-test was used to determine group equivalence on their prior knowledge of the history concepts prior to the posttest. In pretest and posttest submissions, the faculty member coded test scores by the student’s 8-digit university assigned identification number to provide anonymity. Concepts chosen were based on material from The American Journey, 5th Edition (Goldfield, Abbot, Anderson, et.al. 2009). The concepts also were examined to ensure that they fell under the definition of social studies as laid forth by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) in 1992: “Social studies are the integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence. Within the school program, social studies provides coordinated, 63

UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING systematic study drawing upon such disciplines as anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, law, philosophy, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology, as well as appropriate content from the humanities, mathematics, and natural sciences. The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.” (Zarillo, 2013) Small additional supplementary quantitative data was obtained through the social media management dashboard Hootesuite. Hootesuite is a multi-faceted social media management tool that allows users to add a variety of social media accounts to one centralized location. The software provides a user with the option to schedule tweets, conduct analytics of followers, interactions, and mentions, as well as let them search the frequency that specific terms were used. Because the account was set to private and no students were “followed” by @RMUHistory1200, opportunities for interaction was limited. In the case of this study, the analytics were not useful and survey results were relied on to determine how frequently students utilized Twitter. By setting the account to private and not following any of the student Twitter accounts, other analytics tools such as the Google analytics tool called Tags v5.0 were not utilized for this study. Tags v.5.0 is a tool conducts a Twitter search and automatically places the results into a Google spreadsheet format. In addition to archiving all tweets with the search subject in its contents, summaries of users, users by activity level, unique tweets, and retweets can be determined through the Tags v5.0 or Hootesuite analytics. A questionnaire (see Appendix D) was developed utilizing questions crafted by the RMU social media committee (2013) in addition to original questions crafted by the researcher, which 64

UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING pertain solely to this study. Both open-ended - comment box and multiple-choice questions are asked to obtain both quantitative and qualitative data from the participants (Walliman & Buckler, 2008). The questionnaire will be utilized to gather additional data regarding social media usage habits of the students, demographics, and their overall experience as participants of the study. The host faculty and dissertation committee reviewed the questionnaire to ensure its validity. A final qualitative component was developed to capture the experiences of the faculty member who implemented the study. Creswell (2013) suggested utilizing open-ended questions that are general, and focused on the central phenomenon of the study. In accordance, a series of partially scripted, open-ended questions were asked to gather his prior experience with social media, observations from the class, and suggestions for areas of improvement. As Lichtman (2012) suggested, general “grand tour” questions were asked such as “What are your thoughts on social media?” which were designed to lead to more specific questions. See Appendix D for the pre-scripted interview questions. Procedure The Robert Morris University history faculty member was contacted and advised as to what the study entailed. Permission to use students to collect data was granted. The University Institutional Review Board (IRB) approved the study and the approval letter is available in Appendix E. All appropriate permissions will be made available upon request from the researcher for five years. Consent agreement forms were distributed and signed by all participants (see Appendix F). The students were randomly assigned to one of two groups by the faculty member. Each student was assigned to a numeric number alphabetically. Numbers were randomly assigned to the Twitter review group and the traditional review group. The researcher was only provided

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING with each student’s university issued identification number and their corresponding Twitter handle to ensure their privacy. Each student that was part of the Twitter group were provided with basic instructions on utilizing Twitter, (see Appendix G) which have been adopted from http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Twitter. An independent sample t-test was administered to test for differences between the two groups in terms of their concept knowledge following the treatment. Pretest data from a prior exam was used to determine if groups were significantly different in their abilities. Dimitrov & Rumrill (2003) found that a pretest “reduced error variance, thus producing more powerful tests than designs with no pre-test data.” By increasing the power of the statistical test, the probability of Type II error is limited. While acknowledging the various literatures that exists that both questions and supports pretesting, Zimmerman (2009) found that differences are reliable if both pretest and posttest instruments are reliable. Concept Instruction Both the traditional review and Twitter review groups were given the same instructional material within the class period prior to the exam. The instructor utilized a primarily lecture style delivery for the bulk of the course material. The control group received a standard worksheet review for their exam, which was essentially a compilation of the tweeted concepts (see Appendix H). Students selected for the Twitter group were also asked not share Twitter account information with their fellow classmates. The @RMUHistory1200 account was set to private and therefore all tweets were unavailable to any account that is not a “follower”. The Twitter group received tweets regarding 15 pre-determined concepts which included key figures, terms, and events from the unit of study. Tweets occurred based on the timing of the concepts within the class lecture material. For each concept discussed in the course, 3 initial

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING tweets were scheduled via Hootesuite to go out in the morning (10:30 a.m. ET), afternoon (3:30 p.m. ET), and night (7:30 p.m. ET). A screen shot in Appendix I shows an example of scheduled tweets. Each concept had one tweet that included characteristics; another tweet that provided examples related to the concept, and a third tweet that included a non-example of the term. After a concept was tweeted about initially, three review tweets were sent out later in the unit to create a distributed practice for each concept. The host faculty member verified tweets through a shared Google Doc (see Appendix J) prior to publication. Spacing varied based on the number of concepts taught in each lesson. Tweets were spaced according to the calendar attached in Appendix K. Over the 19-day period, 90 tweets went to the Twitter group, with 6 tweets for each concept (15 concepts) being tweeted. A set of tweets were sent out for each term within a week of its introduction of the lecture. Review tweets typically occurred 3-5 days after the concept was tweeted about to provide distributed practice. Concept terms introduced in the final week of the unit will have tweets spaced more closely together due to time constraints. Student Feedback In addition to obtaining quantitative data via the independent samples t-test, Hootesuite, and Google Analytics, students took a survey at the end of the study to determine their individual experiences with during the study, and group demographics. The survey was developed and modified from an instrument created by the RMU social media committee, and was distributed in hard copy format by the instructor. The students were not asked to identify themselves in the survey to protect their anonymity.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Pre-test Post-test Design Selection The pretest posttest design was selected to determine the equivalency of the groups used in the study. Analysis Post-test Data. After the four-week study, a multiple-choice section of questions within the class exam was administered to both the Twitter and traditional review group. The post-test will include 15 questions on the selected concepts. In previous terms, the faculty member has created separate exams to control for cheating and provided them to his classes. The post-test scores for the control and treatment group will be compared to determine the effectiveness of the treatment on concept knowledge achievement Test Analysis. Individual pretest and posttest scores were entered into the SPSS and Microsoft Excel programs to provide comparison between the two groups. An independent samples t-test was used to analyze the scores across the two groups. A critical alpha level of p = .05 will be used. Interview. The participating faculty member was asked a series of questions about experience related to utilizing social media in the classroom. The open-ended questions asked for observations about classroom interaction and engagement. Qualitative analysis was conducted to determine his experience in terms of technology implementation and pedagogical outcomes. Themes were identified through coding and sorting through the interview data. Research Question One To address research question one, “Does utilizing Twitter as a distributed practice tool serve as a more effective review than a traditional end-of-unit study guide for concept learning?”

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING an independent samples t-test was used to compare the group means to determine if Twitter review is superior to a traditional review method. Research Question Two Research question two, “Does Twitter create student engagement in the overall class discussion?” required a combination of measurement tools including the student survey and faculty interview. The researcher examined all descriptive data generated to determine factors such as changing levels of student interaction, frequency of communication, and other identifiable trends. Research Question Three The question, “Is Twitter user-friendly for all stakeholders, students as well as the professor, when incorporated into instructional technology?” was also answered utilizing a combination of measurement tools including the student survey and faculty interview.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING

CHAPTER IV: RESULTS Summary The purpose of this study was to determine whether students who received tweets that were delivered as spaced practice for key concepts in a unit in history had a better performance in their recall of those concepts than students who received a more traditional review through a study guide given at the end of the unit with the same information. The methodology used to determine the effectiveness of Twitter as a review tool was presented in Chapter III and the results of the study are discussed in this chapter. The design of the study was mixed methods and included a quasi-experimental component in which the independent variable was the method of review: the control or traditional worksheet review group, and the Twitter review group. The dependent variable in this study was the test score on a multiple choice section of an exam on 15 key concepts from one unit in an introductory American history class. The research questions examined in this study were: 1. Does utilizing Twitter as a distributed practice tool serve as a more effective review than a traditional end-of-unit study guide for concept learning? 2. Does Twitter create student engagement in the overall class discussion? 3. Is Twitter user-friendly for all stakeholders, students as well as the professor, when incorporated into instructional technology? Research Question One Does Twitter serve as an effective distributed practice tool for concept learning?

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Research Question One was examined by comparing the traditional worksheet review control group to a treatment group that utilized Twitter review spaced over the duration of the unit. Subject test scores from the prior unit exam served as pretest data in an effort to provide evidence that both groups could be considered similar at the beginning of the study. A posttest was administered at the end of the unit, and data was analyzed for concept learning performance. The host instructor for the study requested that each group in the study get Twitter review for an entire unit, so after the initial study took place ex post facto research was conducted so that both groups would be provided with each respective type of review. The group from the initial study that was provided with Twitter review became the control group in the next unit and the initial control group received the Twitter review. Concept learning was tested for each group with an exam at the end of the unit and data was analyzed to determine if statistically significant differences existed in performance. Research Question Two Does Twitter create student engagement in the overall class discussion? Research Question Two was examined by a survey of all of the subjects in which subjects were asked a series of questions related to their experience with Twitter. After the 4week unit ended, the conditions of the study were changed for each group so that the original control group would get the Twitter review for the next 4-weeks, while the treatment group would become the control group and only receive a worksheet review at the end of the next unit. Once all subjects had received the Twitter review for an entire unit of study, they were surveyed on their experience. Data from the results of the survey were gathered and analyzed. Additionally the instructor was interviewed to determine if any additional engagement that might possibly be attributed to the utilization of Twitter.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Research Question Three Is Twitter user-friendly for all stakeholders when incorporated into instructional technology? Research Question Three was examined in a student survey, which also provided opportunities for students to provide feedback through several open-ended questions. Additionally, the instructor was asked interview questions related to the class implementation and his suggestions for practitioners. Data from the results of the student survey and instructor interview were transcribed and analyzed. Analysis An independent samples t-test was used to analyze the end of unit scores between the two groups. Quantitative and qualitative data from student surveys and the instructor interview is presented and analyzed. Data for analysis was generated with the computer software SPSS and QuestionPro. T-Test Analysis Pretest Data The means and standard deviations for the pretests of each group are presented in Table 1. An independent samples t-test was conducted to compare previous unit exam scores between subjects assigned to the Twitter group and subjects assigned to the traditional review group. There was no significant difference in the scores for the Twitter group (M=85.0, SD=11.56) and the traditional group (M=85.9, SD=6.66); t (18) = -.213, p = 0.833. These results suggest that prior to the study the groups of subjects were not particularly different.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Table 1 Means and Standard Deviations on the U.S. History Pretest Group

N

Mean

SD

Twitter

10

85.00

11.56

Traditional

10

85.90

6.66

Descriptive Statistics While the mean pretest scores in the Twitter group (M = 85.0) and traditional group (M = 85.9) were similar, their respective standard deviations, Twitter (SD = 11.56) and Traditional (SD = 6.66), were more varied. An examination of the quartiles in Table 2, however, illustrates that the groups were not all that different from one another within the interquartile range. Table 2 Percentiles for U.S. History Pretest Percentiles

Group 25

50

75

Twitter

80.75

86.50

93.25

Traditional

81.50

85.00

92.00

Box and Whisker Plot – Pre Test Scores A box and whisker plot graph was created for both group’s pretest scores. This analysis was done to visually illustrate the quartiles for each group. Generally box and whisker plots are a method for showing groups of numerical data by quartiles (See Figure 5). From the raw data, one score was very different from the remainder of the scores in the Twitter group and is most 73

UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING likely the cause for the differences in standard deviations between the Twitter (SD = 11.56) and Traditional (SD = 6.66) groups. The researcher made a decision not to exclude the score from the study due to the small sample in the group (n = 10) and because the variability differences in post test scores was small.

Figure 5. Pretest quartile scores for the Twitter and Traditional groups. Posttest Data An independent-samples t-test was conducted to compare performance on the Twitter review and traditional worksheet review conditions. There was no significant difference in the scores for Twitter (M=12.30, SD=1.34) and traditional review (M=12.00, SD=1.41) conditions; t (18) = .487, p = 0.632. These results suggest that using Twitter for review in an introductory college history course may be as effective as a traditional end-of-unit review worksheet (see Table 3).

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Table 3 Means and Standard Deviations on the Concept Posttest Group

N

Mean

SD

Twitter

10

12.30

1.34

Traditional

10

12.00

1.41

Box and Whisker Plot – Post Test Scores Mean scores varied slightly more in the traditional review group (SD = 1.41) than the Twitter group (SD = 1.34).

A box and whisker plot graph was created to show the distribution

of post test scores (See Figure 6).

Figure 6. Posttest quartile scores for the Twitter and Traditional groups. Ex Post Facto Data Ex post facto data was collected in the unit following the initial study.

The conditions

of the study were reversed and the Twitter review group from the initial study became the new control group and the control group became the Twitter group for the following unit. 75

The same

UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING methodology was used to provide the treatment group Tweets spaced out over a 4-week unit for review, while the control group received a traditional worksheet review prior to the exam. As stated above, the conditions were flipped for each group in the following unit at the request of the host instructor to ensure an equality of instructional delivery for all students. While the two units are testing different concepts, the researcher chose to analyze the results to determine if any significant differences existed between the performances of the two flipped groups on their tests.

Table 4 displays the results of the Ex Post Facto study.

Table 4 Means and Standard Deviations on the Ex Post Facto Concept Test Group

N

Mean

SD

Twitter

10

12.60

2.01

Traditional

10

12.70

1.89

An independent-samples t-test was conducted to compare performance on the Twitter review and traditional worksheet review conditions.

Once again, the ex post facto study

showed that there was no significant difference in the scores for Twitter (M=12.60, SD=2.01) and traditional review (M=12.70, SD=1.89) conditions; t (18) = -.115, p = 0.910.

These results

support the findings of the initial study that would suggest that using Twitter for spaced review in an introductory college history course is no different from an end-of-unit review sheet in terms of concept learning performance.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Box and Whisker Plot – Ex Post Facto Test Scores Mean scores varied slightly more in the Twitter group (SD = 2.01) than the traditional review group (SD = 1.89). A box and whisker plot graph was created to show the distribution of post test scores (See Figure 7).

Figure 7. Ex Post Facto quartile scores for the Twitter and Traditional groups.

Summary of Test Results While there is a lack of substantial quantitative data that shows the effect of utilizing Twitter as a review tool, the results are not surprising considering a study by Smith and Tirumala (2012) found that students who used Twitter did not have improved scores in questions that tested memory of class content. Other researchers (Dunlap & Lowenthal, 2009; Paul & Ianitti, 2012; Trueman and Miles, 2011; et. al.) have demonstrated that Twitter can be used as both an instructional tool and a way to provide supplementary communication with students.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Student Survey Results As stated in Chapter III, a questionnaire (see Appendix C) was developed utilizing questions that were modified from a tool created by the RMU social media committee in 2013. The questionnaire included original questions crafted by the researcher that pertained to this study. Both open-ended-comment box and multiple-choice questions were asked to obtain both quantitative and qualitative data from the participants (Walliman & Buckler, 2008).

The data

was analyzed to determine potential themes. Response Rate All of the 20 students in the study were given paper copies of the survey after participating in both the control and treatment groups for a full unit. The surveys were distributed and collected prior to the distribution and collection of their 3rd unit exam on April 10, 2014. Sixteen of the 20 students completed their questionnaires, resulting in an 80% response rate. The 4 students who did not return their surveys may have elected to use their allotted time to prepare for the unit exam while others were completing their surveys. The researcher made this assumption because the survey was voluntary, and provided in the same class period where an exam was administered. Demographics All 16 of the respondents self-identified as full-time students. Only 1 student fell outside of the 18-23 year old age range and would be classified as a non-traditional adult student by the university. Seventy-five percent of the respondents self-identified themselves as either freshman or sophomores. This high percentage of underclassmen would be anticipated in an introductory level course. There was an even split in the gender of respondents and only 2 respondents identified themselves as transfer students. All of the respondents owned smart phones; 75%

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING used iPhones while the remaining 25% were Android users. The School of Business had 43.5% of the respondents who were working towards a degree in business, which was the largest identified area of study, while 12.5% were history majors. See Table 5 for a more detailed account of the respondents’ school of major demographics. Table 5: Demographics of Survey Respondent Majors by School. (n=16) School of Major

n

%

School of Business

7

43.75

School of Communication and Information Systems

2

12.5

School of Education and Social Sciences

2

12.5

School of Engineering, Mathematics and Science

2

12.5

School of Nursing and Health Sciences

3

18.75

Survey Analysis Social Media Usage All but two survey respondents had a Twitter account prior to this study, the instructor mentioned in his interview (see Appendix I) that the one student that expressed that they didn’t have an account said that they chose not to and knew easily how to set one up for this unit. Twitter (93.8%) and Facebook (93.8%) were the social media platforms that were most widely used by respondents, while blogs (6.25%), Flickr (6.25%), and LinkedIn (12.5%) were the least used. Survey Validity The survey was adapted from a survey constructed by the RMU social media committee, which included various university constituents including faculty, staff, and one student that had 79

UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING interest in determining how social media was being used across campus educationally, professionally, and personally. All questions were adapted for the purposes of this study and were reviewed by the host instructor, dissertation committee, and institutional review board prior to distribution. Cronbach’s alpha (α) was used to determine the internal consistency within sections of the survey. Tavakol and Dennick (2011, p. 53) explained that “internal consistency describes the extent to which all of the items in a test measure the same concept or construct and hence it is connected to the inter-relatedness of the items within the test.” The theoretical value of alpha varies from 0 to 1, since it is the ratio of two variances. Higher values of alpha are more desirable. Generally scholars require a reliability of 0.70 or higher (obtained on a substantial sample) before they will use an instrument. (Nunnally 1978, p. 245–246). Miller (1995, p. 255-273) explained that an alpha score of 0.90 should be used as maximum as too high an alpha may signal a redundancy of question material. Nunnally additionally finds that most acceptable alphas fall within the range of 0.75 to 0.83 (Nunnally 1978, p. 245–246). There were two major groups of questions that were analyzed for internal reliability in the survey. Questions 6 through 9, which included 8 items that related to the respondents’ frequency and ease of use of Twitter, were analyzed for internal reliability. The reliability of this section of questions was good based on Cronbach’s alpha (α = 0.78). Additionally question 19, which had 7 items related to respondents’ concerns about using social media, was analyzed. The reliability of this section of questions was also good based on Cronbach’s alpha (α = 0.79). As stated previously, both of these score falls within the 0.70 and 0.90 scale generally required by scholars for reliability.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Twitter Activity Due to the free flowing newsfeed nature of Twitter and its coding structure, it is impossible to determine a number of viewers for each tweet. Google and Hootesuite Analytics also had limited usefulness due to the privacy settings of the @RMUHistory1200 account. Thus information about how frequently respondents utilized Twitter during this unit came from survey responses. Respondents were asked to respond to a series of three questions on a seven item Likert scale (more than once per hour = 6, hourly = 5, more than once per day = 4, daily = 3, 1-5 times per week = 2, a few times per month = 1, never = 0). The three questions asked student how often they utilized Twitter for the course, how often they checked Twitter for the course, and how often they Tweeted information for the course. The lowest score of the three items was for how often students tweeted information related to the course (M = 0.75, SD = 1.13). Students self-reported that they both utilized Twitter (M = 2.88, SD = 1.89) and checked their Twitter feeds for class (M = 2.31, SD = 1.35) on average more than “1-5 times per week” based on their mean scores. Table 6 displays the results of survey questions related to Twitter usage during the study. Table 6 Mean +/- SD Responses for Twitter Usage during Study Category

Mean

SD

How often Twitter was Utilized

2.88

1.89

Shared Information via Twitter

0.75

1.13

Checked Twitter Feed

2.31

1.35

Note. The mean score in Table 6 reflects answers to questions 6, 7, and 8 on the student survey. All student respondents had been given Twitter treatment prior to their responses. Scores are 81

UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING based on a scale ranging from (more than once per hour = 6, hourly = 5, more than once per day = 4, daily = 3, 1-5 times per week = 2, a few times per month = 1, never = 0). Research Questions Students were asked a series of questions directly related to their experiences utilizing Twitter in their course unit. These questions tie directly to research questions two and three respectively: “Does Twitter create student engagement in the overall class discussion?”; “Is Twitter user-friendly for all stakeholders when incorporated into instructional technology?” The following sections describe the results of the survey as they pertain to the key research questions. Student Engagement Question number 9 in the survey (Appendix C) included five statements that the respondents were asked to agree or disagree with on a Likert Scale with the following values (strongly agree = 4, agree = 3, neutral = 2, disagree = 1, and strongly disagree = 0). The item with the highest score of the three student engagement questions was for the item that asked students to compare Twitter’s use as a collaborative tool with Blackboard. This was an interesting takeaway as Twitter provides an open, free, and less formal platform for communication than a typical learning management system such as Blackboard. The first three items were related to student engagement in the unit and the results are displayed in Table 7

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Table 7 Mean +/- SD Scores for Student Engagement Responses Category

Mean

SD

More Engaged than in Other Classes

2.56

.81

Interacted with Peers More Frequently

1.34

.72

Better Collaborative Tool than Blackboard

2.81

.98

Note. The mean score here reflects answers to question 9 on the student survey, which is scored on a Likert Scale with a scale of (strongly agree = 4, agree = 3, neutral = 2, disagree = 1, and strongly disagree = 0). Frequency of Communication The lowest scored item in the student engagement section asked students assess whether they interacted more with peers during the study than they did in other course. This response corresponded with a related question on the survey, which asked students to assess how frequently they tweeted during the study. Responses are displayed in Figure 8. Using a point scale ranging from (7 = more than once per hour, 6 = hourly, 5 = more than once daily, 4 = daily, 3 = 1-5 times per week, 2 = a few times per month, 1 = monthly or less, 0 = never) response scores were very low (M = 0.75, SD = 1.13). The implication of these results will be discussed in further detail in Chapter V, but it is worth noting that the @RMUHistory1200 account was set to private, which prevented “retweets” and “mentions” for the account. Only 1 student “favorited” a tweet during the initial study, while 2 students “favorited” tweets during the ex post facto study.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING

Never A few times per month 1 - 5 times per week More than oncer per day

Figure 8. Student feedback comes directly from question #7 in the survey tool, which asked respondents how frequently they shared class information on Twitter during the study. Ease of Use Based on the survey results and the interview with the instructor, Twitter was userfriendly and did not require any additional class time to train new users. Additionally three students cited the easy to use interface of social media in their open-ended suggestions for educators, while one individual explained that Twitter had an “easier interface, more reliable than blackboard.” Using a scale of (strongly agree = 4, agree = 3, neutral = 2, disagree = 1, and strongly disagree = 0), respondents provided a high rating for Twitter’s ease of use (M = 3.375, SD = 0.719). Figure 9 shows the student responses to an item in question 11 that asked for feedback on the ease of use for Twitter throughout the course unit in terms of positive, neutral, and negative responses. Respondents also provided a high score (M = 2.813, SD = 1.047) to a statement about wanting to see Twitter used in the same manner in other courses in question 9.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING

Positive Neutral

Figure 9. Student feedback for questions related the user-friendliness of utilizing Twitter during the course unit. All answers come directly from question #11 in the survey tool. Concerns with Social Media A series of questions asked students to rate their concern with using social media. Students were asked to rate their level of concern with statements on a scale from (very concerned = 3, concerned = 2, somewhat concerned = 1, not concerned at all = 0). Overall students did not appear to be overly concerned by privacy issues as it relates to using social media. The highest scored item in this question was concern related to prospective employees (M = 1.50, SD = 0.73). Students appeared to be least concerned with their privacy as it related to their peers at their own institution (M = 0.44, SD = 0.63). Responses are displayed in Table 8.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Table 8 Student Concern with Privacy Related to Social Media Usage Category

Overall Privacy

Improper use of Protected Material

Other Students at Institution

Students at other Institutions

University Faculty

University Administrators

Response

#

%

Mean

SD

1.25

.86

0.69

.60

0.50

.63

0.44

.63

0.75

.58

0.88

.81

No Concern

3

18.75%

Somewhat Concerned

7

43.75%

Concerned

5

31.25%

Very Concerned

1

6.25%

No Concern

6

37.50%

Somewhat Concerned

9

56.25%

Concerned

1

6.25%

Very Concerned

0

0.00%

No Concern

9

56.25%

Somewhat Concerned

6

37.50%

Concerned

1

6.25%

Very Concerned

0

0.00%

No Concern

10

62.50%

Somewhat Concerned

5

31.25%

Concerned

1

6.25%

Very Concerned

0

0.00%

No Concern

5

31.25%

Somewhat Concerned

10

62.50%

Concerned

1

6.25%

Very Concerned

0

0.00%

No Concern

6

37.50%

Somewhat Concerned

6

37.50%

Concerned

4

25.00%

Very Concerned

0

0.00%

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING

Category

Prospective Employers

Response

#

%

Mean

SD

No Concern

1

6.25%

1.50

.73

Somewhat Concerned

7

43.75%

Concerned

7

43.75%

Very Concerned

1

6.25%

Note. The responses here reflect answers to question #19 on the student survey. Students were asked to rate their level of concern with statements on a scale from (very concerned = 3, concerned = 2, somewhat concerned = 1, not concerned at all = 0).

There were only three responses in the open ended question that allowed students to share any additional concerns that they had as it related to social media, with one citing “cheating through social media” and one mentioning inappropriate speech or vulgarity from students.

The @RMUHistory1200 account did not “follow” any of the student Twitter

accounts in order to ensure their privacy. Following the participant Twitter accounts throughout this study may have provided additional qualitative data for the researcher. Open-Ended Survey Responses There were a total of seven open-ended questions within the survey. Creswell (2012) stated that data should be organized into themes in qualitative studies. In order to determine themes from the open-ended survey responses, the data was collected and coded in a manner that Saldana (2013) calls “generic coding,” which includes a first cycle and second cycle phase of coding. Utilizing the suggestion of Liamputtong and Ezzy (2005, pp. 270-273), data was formatted into three columns rather than two. In this case the first and widest column is the survey answers. The second column contains the space for the first cycle or preliminary codes, 87

UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING and the third column lists the final codes or categories that develop. Saldana (2013) explains that “the second column’s ruminations or first impressions may help provide a transition between the raw data and codes.” The process of moving from the 1st cycle with multiple codes to a few major themes or one narrative is what Saldana refers to as “2nd cycle coding.” When in the process of determining the major themes, Auerbach and Silverstein (2003) suggest keeping a copy of your research concern or major research questions nearby so that you can focus your findings. The researcher utilized the research questions when creating and modifying the survey tool, but also while coding responses. All of the coding data for open-ended questions can be found in Appendix I. Analysis of Open-Ended Responses The open-ended questions that generated the most feedback referenced student recommendations for educators with respect to using social media (question 17). Table 9 shows a breakdown of responses for the question. While the question called for students to provide recommendations for social media use, the responses could be summarized in a few words. Respondents found social media to be easy to use and understand, helpful in terms of their memory, popular among students, and useful. One respondent recommended that the quality of information shared is most important for educators, and three others suggested using social media more often. Several respondents’ answers could be classified in more than one category, with “usefulness” being the most commonly categorized response.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Table 9 Themes Developed from Student Open-Ended Responses Theme Twitter is easy for students to use and useful in classroom instruction.

Example Quotes from Students’ Responses “Use these; it is easier for our generation to understand.” “It is a lot more useful to answer student questions.”

Twitter is a popular social media platform for college students.

“Social media is very popular and students use it every day.” “Finding the popular site students use (Twitter) is helpful because students can effortlessly be exposed to information.”

Twitter helps students remember class material.

“Use it more. The Twitter helped me remember in class.” “It helps students remember so I would recommend using it”

Other Types of Social Media There were three open ended questions that were related to additional forms of social media that students used which were not mentioned in survey questions. These questions referenced social media used for school work, personal use, and professional use respectively. Instagram and Pinterest were listed most frequently (n = 5), while Snapchat was listed by two people. Pinterest was listed by one individual for as a tool for school work, and none of the other social networks listed in question 13 responses were mentioned as tools for school work, or professional use. Another finding is that all five participants that mentioned Pinterest were female, while four of the five participants that mentioned Instagram were also female. These are both photo based and more visual in nature, while Pinterest is a network that allows users to create an organized “bulletin board” of photos. Figure 10 shows a word cloud of the responses to question 13 dealing with personal usage of social media.

89

UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING

Figure 10. Student feedback in response to Question 13 in the student survey. This word cloud is a visual depiction of user-generated responses to the question item. Word clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the responses.

Other Social Media used in Schoolwork A word cloud is also a useful tool when examining the results of question 11, which asked students if they used any additional social media for schoolwork. Figure 11 shows the responses. It appears that students cite discussions and projects most frequently in their responses. This corresponds with studies that used social media as an additional discussion (Dunlap & Lowenthal, 2009; Ebner, Lienhardt, Rohs, & Meyer, 2010; et.al) or as tool used in projects (Kassens-Noor, 2012; Holotescu & Grosseck, 2009).

90

UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING

Figure 11. Student feedback is in response to Question 11 in the student survey. This word cloud is a visual depiction of user generated responses to the question item. Word clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the responses.

Professional Use of Social Media The question about using social media for professional purposes yielded some interesting findings. It appeared evident that some respondents weren’t completely sure what classified as “social media.” Of the five respondents, four listed sites that were not social media sites and one felt that social media was not professional. One respondent that mentioned sites accurately described a professional social networking site (SpiceWorks), while another referred to a university job board site, but conceded that weren’t sure if it was social media. This phenomenon will be discussed in more detail in Chapter V, but it presents the question if students truly understand what qualifies for social media or a social network.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Concerns Related to Social Media As stated previously, respondents overall did not have high levels of concern over the use of social media. Two open-ended questions (18 and 20) were related to concerns and inappropriate use of social media. Figure 12 shows feedback related to the question related to inappropriate use. The “College Confessions” Twitter account was mentioned most frequently as an inappropriate form of social media use. The account tweets out anonymous “confessions” from college students that they send in the form of a direct message. The institutional college confession page was referenced as well.

Figure 12. Student feedback is in response to Question 18 in the student survey. This word cloud is a visual depiction of user generated responses to the question item. Word clouds give more prominence to words that appear more frequently in the responses.

Three respondents answered the open ended question regarding additional concerns related to social media. Each respondent provided a unique answer, with one mentioning academic cheating, another citing vulgarity and inappropriate comments, and a final one that provided advice to the institution to improve their Twitter presence through more frequent and varied usage.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Topics of Interest Related to Social Media Question 16 asked students to provide any additional areas of interest that they may have related to social media. Of the five students that responded, three showed interest in business or marketing usage and the other two were interested in educational uses for social media. Marketing and advertising were specifically mentioned twice by respondents. Faculty Interview An interview was conducted with the faculty participant in his office after the completion of the study on April 25, 2014. This interview was conducted in addition to an ongoing dialogue that existed between the researcher and host faculty in addition to triangulate the findings of the survey and test results. While the faculty member was a content expert who helped validate tweets, much of the information that was obtained in the interview was based on his anecdotal observations about the class that participated in the study. In addition to his roles of hosting the study and validating tweets, the instructor served as a sounding board for the researcher for quality assurance. The faculty interview was digitally recorded and transcribed by the researcher. Lichtman (2013) advises an interviewer to develop a rapport with the interviewee prior to asking pre-determined questions, and this working relationship had already been established during the course of the study, so the interview immediately began with questions related to the study (Appendix I). The interview transcription was coded using a method of coding described by Charmaz (2006) as focused coding. Charmaz explains that focused coding “requires decisions about which initial codes make the most analytic sense,” and create “the most salient categories” (Charmaz, 2006, pp. 46, 57).

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Category Development The interview with the faculty member focused on the primary research questions in terms of student learning, student engagement, and ease of use for implementing Twitter into instruction.

Primary categories were developed from initial codes extracted the faculty

interviewee’s responses as displayed in Appendix K. Three primary categories were developed: the familiarity and ease of use of Twitter; rationale for the lack of student engagement throughout the study; suggestions for educators and future research. Faculty interview categories are displayed in Table 11. Table 11 Categories and Subcategories Developed from Faculty Interview Category: Students Familiar with Twitter and Ease of Use       

FAMILIARITY WITH SOCIAL MEDIA PROFESSIONAL USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA NEARLY ENTIRE CLASS USED TWITTER ALREADY TWITTER ACCOUNT EASY TO SET UP EASY TO GET STARTED QUICK AND EASY TO ACCESS “MEETING THEM WHERE THEY ARE”

Category: Student Engagement Rationale     

LITTLE INTERACTION DUE TO CLASS LEVEL MAJORITY OF STUDENTS NOT HISTORY MAJORS CLASS TIME AFTER LUNCH TIME OF CLASS PRIVACY SETTINGS OF TWITTER ACCOUNT

Category: Suggestions for Educators and Future Research        

TWEETS SHOULD BE REINFORCED TWEETS CAN BE INFORMATIVE SPACE PRACTICE FOR BOTH GROUPS MORE TWEETS, MORE INFORMATION PROVIDED MORE ASSESSEMENT/MEASUREMENT USE AS DISCUSSION TOOL ASK QUESTIONS BY TWEETS HAVE STUDENTS CREATE THE POSTS

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Familiarity and Ease of Use of Twitter The instructor interview supported student survey responses that the study participants were not only using Twitter, but found it easy to implement social media into their coursework. The instructor used a variation of the phrase “meeting them where they are,” twice in his responses. He also commented on how quickly and easily the project could get started. While training material was provided in case there were new Twitter users, no students took him up on the offer to utilize it and the experiment was able to get started “in the blink of an eye.” In addition to the students who utilized Twitter frequently, the instructor cited a personal working knowledge of Twitter and Facebook. He explained that this was his first time incorporating social media into his instruction, but that he had used it for networking and idea sharing between colleagues at different institutions in the past.

Despite the students’ familiarity

with Twitter, little student interaction occurred throughout the study. The instructor’s rationale for this will be discussed in the next section and examined more in depth in Chapter V. Student Engagement Rationale The instructor provided a list of reasons that he attributed to the limited class engagement that occurred during the study. The first reason that he cited was the class level. As this was an introductory history course, he explained that he typically doesn’t find that there is much interaction in those types of courses. Part of this reason he explained was that there aren’t many history majors in the class and therefore they aren’t as engaged. This course is simply a graduation requirement to many of the students who decide to take it. The instructor also made reference to the time the class was taught. The class was held twice per week on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 2:00 p.m. He has experienced that classes held that closely after lunch rarely are as engaged as others that would occur prior to lunch, citing

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING 11:00 a.m. as the best time to engage a class in his opinion. While the researcher suggested to the instructor that the privacy settings may have affected the level of interaction, the instructor did not feel that those settings would have changed the interaction level much based on the way Twitter was being used. The instructor included some suggestions for how to get more interaction out of Twitter in his series of suggestions for educators and for future research. Suggestions for Educators and Future Research While the researcher will address suggestions for future research in Chapter V, one of the three primary categories that resulted from the instructor’s interview was his suggestions for future research. The instructor explained that he did not discuss tweets or even mention the Twitter account frequently during the study in order to keep from influencing the outcomes. If he were to do this again in one of his classes he felt that he would want to discuss the tweets or provide some ongoing assessments to ensure that the tweets were providing value. He was surprised at the quality of information that was able to be conveyed within the 140-character limit provided by Twitter, which provides an opportunity for future educators. Other suggestions the instructor provided included more and varied tweets for more concepts. The study utilized three to six tweets per day with up to three new concepts and three review concepts per day. The instructor felt that varying the type of tweets and increasing the concepts covered would be beneficial. The concept portion of the exam was 15 questions and there were still additional portions of the exam that were not covered by the Twitter material. In addition to more Twitter material, the instructor suggested that Twitter could be used as more of a conversational tool. The instructor indicated he had trouble distinguishing the value of using Twitter as opposed to a learning management system such as Blackboard, other

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING than it is already used widely by students. Research focusing on Twitter in education used Twitter for a discussion tool as opposed to the concept learning method employed in this study. Other possibilities for Twitter suggested by the instructor were asking students questions by Twitter and having their answers assessed throughout the class. This could be a way to ensure Twitter use and increased engagement. In addition, the idea proposed to the instructor by the researcher about assigning students to create original tweets was well received. The instructor stated that his colleagues had done similar assignments using Facebook and it seemed like it could be an effective strategy. Chapter Summary This chapter presented the results for each of the primary research questions utilizing both quantitative and qualitative findings. Demographic information of the survey participants was presented in order to describe the subjects of the study. Results from the independent samples t-tests were used to answer the first research question, which asked whether Twitter served as a more effective review tool than traditional worksheet review in a history concept learning achievement test measurement. Student survey responses and faculty interview responses were used to answer the second and third research questions which addressed whether Twitter created increased student engagement and was easy to incorporate into classroom instruction. The final chapter reviews and discusses these findings, while connecting the finding of this study to the existing review of literature available on Twitter as an instructional tool. It also discusses the limitations of the study, and offers suggestions for future research for using social media in the classroom.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING CHAPTER V: DISCUSSION Introduction This study was an examination of the effectiveness of Twitter as a review tool for concept learning in comparison to a traditional end of chapter study guide in an introductory college U.S. history course. Chapter IV presented the test results from the study, survey results from the participants, as well as an analysis derived from the faculty co-researcher who hosted the study. Central themes that emerged from the student participants’ responses were presented and categories were developed from the faculty member’s responses. This chapter includes a brief summary of the findings pertaining to each of the research questions that were presented in Chapter I. The primary focus of this chapter is to discuss the meaning of the results of this study and their implications to educators. The chapter finishes with a discussion on the limitations of the study and proposes recommendations for future research. Research Questions Does utilizing Twitter as a distributed practice tool serve as a more effective review than a traditional end-of-unit study guide for concept learning? Twenty students in an introductory college history course participated in this study. Ten students received daily review tweets over the course of a 4 week unit and the remaining 10 students were provided with a traditional study guide prior to the exam that was a compilation of the information tweeted. There was no significant difference in the scores for Twitter and traditional review conditions. Ex post facto comparisons using the same groups but flipped conditions also showed that there was no significant difference in the scores for Twitter and traditional review conditions.

These scores show that while many educators are leery of using

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING social media in the classroom that Twitter may serve as an equally effective review tool as a traditional study guide for concept learning. Does Twitter create student engagement in the overall class discussion? Sixteen (80%) of the 20 student participants returned their surveys following the study. Surveys were distributed after the ex-post facto research had been conducted, so therefore all survey recipients had been a part of the Twitter group for an entire unit prior to taking the survey. Various survey items for instance or such as which ones, refresh the reader and openended questions same were related to student engagement during the study. One of the themes developed from student open-ended responses was that Twitter is a popular social media platform for college students. Despite that finding, students reported low scores on their frequency of communicating on Twitter for the class, how frequently they checked their Twitter feed for class, and their level of interaction with peers in the class. These results may be explained by a number of factors which were described by the host faculty member interviewed following the study. He cited the nature of an introductory course with few history majors, the class time (immediately after lunch), and the privacy settings of the Twitter account as potential impediments to class engagement. Twitter was used in a very specific methodical way in this study that included a private account, and tweets that were only sent out as examples, non-examples, and characteristics of concepts from class. Is Twitter user-friendly for all stakeholders, students as well as the professor, when incorporated into instructional technology? By the accounts of survey results and the interview with the instructor, Twitter was userfriendly and did not require any additional class time to train new users. The faculty member also said that at the outset of the study all but one student reported that they had Twitter accounts

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING and the one student who did not have an account did so by choice, not out of technological difficulties. Participants provided high scores for the ease of use of Twitter as well as for a statement that they would like to see Twitter used in the same way in other classes. Respondents also found Twitter to be a better and more reliable form of communication than Blackboard style learning management systems. Another aspect of user-friendliness that was explored in this study was student and faculty concerns over privacy and misuse of Twitter or other forms of social media. Overwhelmingly students did not appear concerned with their privacy as it related to all university constituents. Their highest level of concern was for future employers that may view their social media accounts. In terms of social media misuse, several respondents cited “College Confessions” Twitter accounts as a place where students may anonymously post inappropriate material. Overall this appeared to be an area where the respondents did not appear to be concerned. Implications of the Study This section will explicitly discuss the implication of the results while integrating the theoretical background and relevant literature findings. The study will be examined in relation to the literature review for consistencies and inconsistencies and the findings will be reviewed to determine if they support or differ from existent theoretical positions. While limited quantitative research on Twitter as an instructional review tool exists, this study provides some insights on how Twitter may be used for teaching concepts and the rationale for why Twitter should be considered as a valuable tool that has not widely been incorporated into the classroom. The intention of this research was to determine the effectiveness of Twitter as a review tool for concept learning in an introductory college history course. Two groups of students were

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING randomly selected and placed into separate groups; one receiving daily sets of tweets with examples, non-examples, and characteristics of concepts, and the other receiving a traditional study guide prior to the exam with the same information from the tweets in paper format. The exam results for both groups suggested that Twitter may serve as an equally effective review tool for concept learning to traditional study guides. Several points from the findings warranted additional discussion. Participants found that Twitter was easy to use and incorporate into their classwork, that it was popular among their fellow classmates, and that Twitter helped them remember class material. Additionally students that were surveyed were not generally concerned with their privacy in terms of social media use. One surprising finding for the researcher was that Twitter did not enhance student engagement in the class based on the results of the student survey and faculty interview. This is perhaps an area that educators who attempt to integrate technology into the classroom should focus on in future research. By changing the delivery method in this study, Twitter was shown to be as effective as traditional methods, but the question arises if educators need to ensure a more engaged student in order to consider a new technology successful. Concept Learning through Distributed Practice An issue that arose from this study was that the timeline for the study was limited to a unit within an introductory college history course. The nature of the course itself did not include cumulative material or testing, so the longest duration for concepts to be implemented would typically be 1 course unit or approximately 4 weeks of time. The literature on spaced practice varies considerably in duration from studies such as one from Underwood (1961) that considered intervals of greater than 15 seconds to be distributed practice in learning word lists as compared

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING to two to eight second intervals for massed practice; Smith and Rothkopf (1984) examined spacing one eight hour statistics class over four sessions of two hours apiece. While these studies all demonstrated subjects with improved performance based on spaced practice, they were not studying the spacing of supplementary review tools, but rather the primary instructional delivery method. Caple (1996) researched the effects of spacing practice and review in computer assisted instruction, and found that recall and retention were improved when tested within a one week period. Despite the one week gap between instruction and testing for recall, all of the spaced practice occurred during the initial day of computer aided instruction. While Caple’s study more closely mirrored this study, their study did not space practice in the same manner over a similar time period. Due to the tight time constraints of a one unit (4 week) period, in order to send out tweets two separate times within the unit, the same tweets were spaced as closely as 1 or 2 days apart at times (see Appendix H). This may not have been adequate spacing of tweets to produce an effect that would help students recall and retain information in their exam. Unlike studies that examined recalling syllables or nonsense words such as Ebbinghouse (1885), this study looked at introductory U.S. history concepts, which may have required increased time for spacing effect. While Tulving and Pearlstone (1966) found that adding the external cues of category names helped subjects’ memory, a similar phenomenon did not occur in this study. While utilizing a hashtag (#) for each term may have effectively categorized concepts, this information was not reiterated to students during the study, and in turn students may not have taken advantage of this feature to study individual concepts. Future research should consider exploring the categorizing abilities of hashtags within Twitter feeds.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Another possible consideration for the outcome of this study might have been that the “spaced practice” utilized was not functionally spaced practice. Cepeda et. al. (2006) defined spaced practice as “the effect of interstudy interval (ISI) upon learning, as measured on subsequent tests.” This study utilized spaced practice by that definition because there was a larger interstudy interval for the Twitter group than the traditional review group prior to the unit exam. One aspect that made this study different than spaced practice studies such as Caple’s (1996) study on computer aided instruction, or Ebbinghouse’s (1885) study on nonsense syllables is that there was no ongoing assessment for each subject. This study focused on looking at Twitter as a passive form of information distribution, rather than a “mini-quiz” generator which is also a possibility for future research. Truly spaced practice may require students to recall information from the tweets on a spaced basis throughout the unit. By not incorporating some additional stimulus or requiring an immediate response from students following a tweet, some aspects of memory were not incorporated. Hull’s (1943) stimulus-response theory for example explained that people learn to associate a particular response or concept to the various stimuli that define that concept. Without a follow up question or some additional incentive, students didn’t have any additional stimuli to associate with Twitter. Part of this decision to not utilize Twitter in this manner was to control for one group getting more information or assessment than the other, which would likely have skewed the results and prevented a fair comparison of delivery methods. Beyond obtaining the information that would be used on quiz questions, subjects in the Twitter group had no real additional incentive to check their Twitter feeds regularly. While survey results showed that students

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING checked their Twitter feeds, even if infrequently, they were not required to do anything with the information on an ongoing basis. Ease of Use One of the major considerations prior to this study was determining how to ensure that students would be able to access and use Twitter effectively. After finding a “how to” guide (Appendix G) for new Twitter users and consulting with the host faculty member, the researcher was confident that students could be easily taught how to use Twitter and follow along for the course of the study. This guide turned out to be unnecessary when it was found that all students either had an account or knew how to navigate Twitter easily. The host faculty member also said that he received no technology or Twitter related questions or complaints from the students throughout the entire study. In addition to the ease of use for the students, the collaboration between the faculty member and researcher in creating and distributing the tweets was made easy through readily available technology. Tweets were created in Google Drive by the researcher and shared with faculty member so that at any point prior to the tweet being published comments or corrections were easily made. Hootesuite, a social media management utility, was also a free an effective tool for scheduling tweets in advance. This prevented the researcher from having to constantly update the Twitter feed with new material, while compiling a list of past tweets and future tweets that was easy to navigate. The idea of easily compiling tweets in an archived list also brings up another point that should be investigated in future research. Twitter allows you to go back and search the lists of tweets by user, hashtag, or keyword. In this study every concept had three original tweets with a hashtag for the term as well as a #RMUHistory hashtag. Even a novice Twitter user could have

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING engaged in both spaced and massed practice by simply reviewing the list of tweets that were created by the @RMUHistory1200 account prior to the exam. While this would have given the Twitter group an inherent advantage to the traditional review group, it was not discussed or encouraged by the faculty member for the sake of the study. Rationale for Class Engagement Twitter did not enhance student engagement for the class based on survey responses and the faculty interview. The faculty member provided various reasons for this lack of engagement including the time of the class (right after lunch), the introductory level of the class, and the fact that there weren’t many history majors in a class that was a graduation requirement for all traditional undergraduate students. Another reason that there may not have been as much engagement in the class as anticipated by the researcher is that the study took place in only one class, which required the study’s Twitter account to be made private. By setting the account to private, controls were put in place that would prevent the traditional review group from seeing the tweets that their classmates in the Twitter group could see. This also prevented users from retweeting information, which often plays an important role in Twitter dialogue. While Twitter has been referred to as a “cocktail party” of conversations, the dialogue in this study was completely one sided and did not allow for student interaction. Despite there being limited interaction during this study, these results only should be viewed in the context of how Twitter was utilized in this study. Twitter has been shown in other studies to create richer dialogue outside of the classroom (Grosseck & Holotescu, 2008), more interactive with faculty (Junco, Heiberger, & Loken, 2011), and provided an opportunity for more introverted students to participate in class discussion (Paul & Ianitti, 2012). While this

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING study found that Twitter did not increase student engagement, students still reported that Twitter was popular among their classmates and helped them remember facts from class. Students Unconcerned About Privacy While many privacy issues exist in regards to social media usage, the students in this study overwhelmingly did not to appear to be concerned. This goes against the literature that shows colleges have begun to monitor incoming and current students’ social media activity more closely. A 2012 Kaplan (Schaffer & Wong) study found that college admissions officers’ discovery of online material damaging to applicants nearly tripled from 2011-2012. Likewise Barnes (2006) found that “a social exchange between friends has now become a way for universities to monitor student behavior.” There have also been a number of court cases that demonstrate the impact of negative student behavior on social media. In the 2007 Layshock v Hermitage School District case, a student made “vulgar, defamatory, and plainly offensive school-related speech (Cain & Fink, 2010)” about his principal, which prompting the school to suspend him and move him to an alternative school for ten days. While the court later ruled the school had violated Layshock’s right to freedom of speech, exercising caution on social media accounts should be an important lesson taught in schools. Technology has continued to improve making information collection via social media more accessible. The latest iteration of Facebook’s mobile application now has the capability “to record an ‘audio fingerprint’ from the smartphone-recorded sound (a process which cannot be reversed) and this fingerprint is matched to Facebook's database of songs and television shows” (Reilly, 2014, para. 6). With these types of new technologies and innovations such as Google Glass and other new products that will be integrate computers and social media into every aspect

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING of life. This makes it essential for students to learn about the importance of a person’s social media footprint and its potential career and reputation implications. Delimitations and Limitations of the Study This study took place in one an introductory history class that could register up to 49 people. Prior to beginning the study, the faculty member had anticipated that the class would be at nearly maximum capacity and only 23 students registered. At the time that the study was set to begin, only 20 of the 23 students had taken their previous unit exam and therefore only 20 students pretest scores were considered for inclusion in the study. This relatively small sample size with 10 students in the Twitter group and 10 in the traditional review group makes the generalizability of this study limited. Another delimitation to the study was the result of having to use one class of students. By setting the account to private and not “following” the students in the class, there was little way of knowing what type, if any dialogue was ensuing. The decision not to follow students was made in concert by the researcher, his committee, and the host faculty member in order to protect and maintain student privacy. The researcher relied on the survey results and faculty interview to get all insights on student engagement. Analytical tools available through Google and Hootesuite were rendered ineffective as a result of the privacy controls. If the study would have taken place in two separate classes, the account could have been left open to the public and therefore more analysis could have taken place. After discussing the results of the study with the host faculty, it is clear that the framework is in place to reuse the tweets that were created for future class sections. These class sections may provide more opportunity for class interaction and analysis.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING This study was also limited by the amount of time available to complete the study. Because a unit of study was 4 weeks long, there was not a lengthy period of time to space the review for each concepts. Tweets typically went out within one or two days of their introduction in class and then they were repeated sometimes two or three days later in order to maintain consistency and get all material covered in the short timeframe. This may not have provided adequate time for a true spacing effect to take place. The complexity of the material is also worth mentioning as delimitation. Because the concepts of dollar diplomacy for example were presented in an introductory history class, the material was not complex in relation to upper level history course material. This might have created an environment where some students did not need to thoroughly review or practice the material leading up to their exam. Without having feedback from the students on how much they studied for their exam, it is difficult to determine what type of role review played in the students’ exam scores. Speculations and Recommendations for Future Research There were several findings from this study that warrant future research. While this study showed that Twitter could be as effective as a traditional paper study guide for introductory college history concepts, there are ways that the methodology could have been revised to potentially be more effective. Additionally, some of the findings related to student privacy should demonstrate the need for more social media education on campuses to either be integrated into the curriculum or featured in first year experience type programs. Twitter as a Spaced and Massed Practice Tool As stated previously, Twitter has the potential to be used for both spaced and massed practice because of its ability to archive information. This is not something that can be done with

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING a traditional paper review at the end of the chapter. If the faculty member could have provided some additional up front instruction on when to specifically look for tweets during the study, and demonstrated the archiving capabilities of Twitter to the students, they would have been better prepared to study the material on an ongoing basis as well as conducted a massed practice session prior to their exam. While hypothetically an instructor could cut out paper copies of concept definitions and distribute them regularly to the class to over the course of a unit, Twitter would appear to be a more efficient way of spacing review. This study did not examine Twitter’s additional ability to mass practice through archived lists of tweets. A future study that might compare Twitter as a massed and spaced practice tool versus a massed practice tool such as a study guide may provide some additional insights. Twitter as a Distributed Practice Tool for a Cumulative Exam As stated previously, this study took place over a one unit of study, which took approximately four weeks. An ex post facto study was done over a similar time frame for another unit of study. None of the material in these two units was truly cumulative as they were looking at two different periods in United States history. In a more specialized course that had a cumulative final exam over a typical 15 week semester, some additional spacing effect may occur. By focusing on a more specific point in history for a longer period of time, for example a class on the U.S. Civil War, reoccurring themes or concepts might be able to be emphasized through the spacing of tweets. In a four week unit, there was a great deal of varying information that spaced tightly together. Any new information from the last class session prior to the exam had to be first tweeted about and then tweeted about again the very next day in order to fit the information into

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING its time constraints. While this phenomenon might occur in any class, it appeared to be more problematic in a class where new information isn’t built upon previous information from the class. Twitter as a Tool for Learning Assessment As stated previously, literature on spacing practice included ongoing assessment of learning through practice. This study did not provide ongoing assessment due to the desire of the researcher and faculty member to maintain equity of the information provided to each group and because of the limited time constraints of the study. In the interview with the faculty member following the study he suggested using Twitter to quiz the students throughout the unit. By utilizing Twitter to assess what the students are learning, it may provide an opportunity to better utilize spaced practice as opposed to simply looking at spaced review. A study that looked at interspersed Twitter quizzes throughout the unit or semester versus frequent paper quizzes might provide valuable insight into other uses for Twitter as an instructional tool. A researcher may want to consider whether those Twitter quizzes should be formal (graded) or informal to see if they could boost class engagement and interaction. Speculations from the Researcher This study took place at the same institution where the researcher is enrolled. While this decision was made for convenience, part of the analysis of this study should look at the population of students who attend the host institution. According to 2012 National Student Satisfaction Evaluation (NSSE) information provided by the university’s Office of Institutional Research, the average RMU freshman respondent worked approximately 2.5 hours off campus per week, while the average RMU senior respond worked approximately 15.5 hours off campus per week (Appendix O). Both of these numbers are higher than peer private institutions and

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING national averages. Mobile technology might be a more effective review tool for students who are employed or have significant extracurricular time demands placed on them such as varsity athletes or those students involved in performing arts. Student employment demographics were not included in the survey, but this might be an area of interest for future research. While Twitter did not prove to be more effective than traditional review methods in this study, one question should be considered is if the conditions for each group in the study were considerably different. In an effort to provide a sound methodology for this study, the Twitter condition only differed from the traditional method by the specific method by which information is communicated to students. One question that comes forth for future research is to examine if Twitter or other technology makes it easier for students and faculty to share or receive information in such a way that the content itself or the classroom dynamic is qualitatively different, and hopefully more effective. In addition to the quantitative findings from this study, the feedback from the participating students and faculty, along with the review of the literature indicates that Twitter has merit as an educational tool. When creating this research methodology, Twitter specifically appeared to be best suited for concept learning because its 140-character limit requires concise writing while maintaining the mobility to space learning better than traditional methods. Despite the findings that Twitter was no more effective than traditional worksheet review quantitatively, the qualitative component might be more important in any study where a new instructional delivery method is being implemented. In this study, Twitter wasn’t used in a way that was conducive to building classroom discussion and engagement. Those findings just demonstrate that Twitter should be used as both a way to convey information effectively, but also as an instrument to create interactive conversations.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING One possible use of Twitter that might prove to be effective is to have the class assist in the creation of original tweets as a review for an exam. As the researcher discovered throughout this study, creating tweets not only provided a compiled list of information that could be used in a study guide format, but it also helped in better understanding the history concepts being studied. In an effort to efficiently create 140-character tweets that included the hashtagged concept, it was imperative to understand the concept and synthesize in order to provide the class with examples, non-examples, and characteristics of the term. Twitter should also be considered as a tool that could be used in tandem with traditional review methods and discussion tools. By incorporating a new technology into the classroom, it differentiates the instruction, but at the same time, it would appear unlikely that it could be used as a sole means for review. Unless the instructor develops creative ways to implement actual practice and assessment from the students, Twitter as a passive information provider does not appear to be any more effective than handing out the class a review sheet. While survey respondents felt that Twitter offered a better means of communication than Blackboard discussion boards, perhaps utilizing both methods of dialogue could have created more of a connection to the content in the course. Twitter is not designed to be an educational content management system like Blackboard so perhaps the two tools in tandem could create a more thorough class discussion. Twitter might be used for short exchanges, while Blackboard could be utilized for longer posts and for pieces of information that require more storage space. After reflecting on this study perhaps there is other characteristics of Twitter that were not utilized in this study, which might make it more effective than traditional methods. Twitter provides a quick and easy platform to create and post photos, videos, or links to other material anywhere on the internet. While these resources were not explored in this study, they materials

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING that aren’t easily replicated in the traditional classroom. Future studies may consider a mixture of using Twitter to assess students, post photos of historical artifacts, create a dialogue with students and educators from around the world, or to even post videos of historical reenactments created by the class. The possibilities of Twitter are as massive as the internet itself, and it is up to educators to help their students safely and effectively navigate its terrain. Summary The study focused on a comparison of the results of concept achievement tests between a Twitter and traditional review group, the students’ perceptions on using Twitter in their class, faculty perceptions of utilizing social media in instruction, and a review of the related literature to determine the effectiveness of utilizing Twitter as a tool for distributed practice of concepts in an introductory college history course. This chapter examined the results for each research question discussed and crucial findings were analyzed. Implications of the research were examined and categorized according to both the quantitative and qualitative results. Limitations of the study were discussed and the author’s speculations and suggestions for future research were also proposed. Implications of this study include a discussion on using Twitter for spaced practice, Twitter’s ease of use in the classroom, a rationale for the limited student engagement during the study, and students’ lack of concern for their privacy while using social media. Each of these topics was discussed in detail and speculations were made for the specific results in this study. Speculations included that the study conditions were so similar for each group that there was no distinct differences created in the classroom environment or the quality of information provided to either group. The question was posed by the author as to whether social media or other

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING technologies need to necessarily engage student’s more than traditional methods in order to be deemed worthwhile additions to instruction. Several suggestions were made for future research including studies that would explore both the massed and spaced practice potential of Twitter. While students had the ability to utilize Twitter in both ways throughout this study, no training or class discussion was held to inform the Twitter group about this functionality. Additional research might look at Twitter as a spaced practice tool over a longer duration for a cumulative examination. Likewise, future research might examine the addition of ongoing assessment throughout a unit that ensured students were checking their Twitter feeds for new information. While social media can provide a valuable platform for teachers, it is not without its challenges. Governments have gone as far as the state of Missouri in 2011 passing a law that banned teachers from “friending” students on Facebook (Hartman, 2011). The law was later repealed by the Supreme Court, but the message remains clear: social media is a complex communication platform to navigate for schools and families. Social media can be a great resource for teachers and students, but it is imperative that the teacher educate students first on potential hazards in social media, while modeling how to conduct oneself professionally and personally as they develop a social media footprint. Due to its booming popularity and a functionality that provides communication beyond the classroom, it is impossible for educators to ignore the potential merits of incorporating social media into the instructional environment.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Appendix A The Brief History of Social Media Where people interact freely, sharing and discussing information about their lives.

1969 CompuServe was the first major commercial Internet service provider for the public in the United States. Using a technology known then as dialup, it dominated the field through the 1980s and remained a major player until the mid-1990s. 1971 The first email was delivered. 1978 Two Chicago computer hobbyists invented the bulletin board system (BBS) to inform friends of meetings, make announcements and share information through postings. It was the rudimentary beginning of a small virtual community. Trolling and flame wars began. 1979 Usenet was an early bulletin board that connected Duke University and the University of North Carolina. 1984 The Prodigy online service was introduced. Later, it grew to become the second-largest online service provider in 1990, with 465,000 subscribers compared with CompuServe's 600,000. In 1994, Prodigy pioneered sales of dial-up connections to the World Wide Web and hosting services for Web publishers. Subsequently, it was resold repeatedly and now is part of AT&T. 1985 The America Online (AOL) service opened. 1989 British engineer Tim Berners-Lee began work at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland), on what was to become the World Wide Web. 1992 Tripod opened as a community online for college students and young adults. 1993 CERN donated the WWW technology to the world. Students at NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) displayed the first graphical browser, Mosaic, and Web pages as we know them today were born. More than 200 Web servers were online.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING THE DAWNING 1994 Beverly Hills Internet (BHI) started Geocities, which allowed users to create their own websites modeled after types of urban areas. GeoCities would cross the one million member mark by 1997. There were 38 million user Web pages on GeoCities before it was shut down for United States users in 2009. Yahoo, which opened as a major Internet search engine and index in 1994, owns GeoCities today and offers it only as a web hosting service for Japan. More than 1,500 Web servers were online in 1994 and people were referring to the Internet as theInformation Superhighway. EarthLink started up as an online service provider. 1995 Newsweek headlines an article: The Internet? Bah! Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn't, and will never be, nirvana. read it here » 1997 The Web had one million sites. Blogging begins. SixDegrees.com lets users create profiles and list friends. AOL Instant Messenger lets users chat. Blackboard is founded as an online course management system for educators and learners. 1998 Google opens as a major Internet search engine and index. 1999 Friends Reunited, remembered as the first online social network to achieve prominence, was founded in Great Britain to relocate past school pals. 2000 In the world of business and commerce, the dot.com bubble burst and the future online seemed bleak as the millennium turned. Seventy million computers were connected to the Internet. 2001 Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia and world's largest wiki, was started. Apple started selling iPods. 2002 Friendster, a social networking website, was opened to the public in the U.S. and grew to 3 million users in three months.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING AOL had 34 million members. 2003 MySpace. another social networking website, was launched as a clone of Friendster. Linden Lab opened the virtual world Second Life on the Internet. LinkedIn was started as a business-oriented social networking site for professionals. There were more than 3 billion Web pages. Apple introduced the online music service iTunes. 2004 Facebook, another social networking website, was started for students at Harvard College. It was referred to at the time as a college version of Friendster. MySpace surpassed Friendster in page views. Podcasting began on the Internet. Flickr image hosting website opened. Digg was founded as a social news website where people shared stories found across the Internet. AFTER THE DAWN 2005 Bebo, an acronym for Blog Early, Blog Often, was started as another social networking website. News Corporation, a global media company founded by Rupert Murdoch, with holdings in film, television, cable, magazines, newspapers and book publishing, purchased MySpace. Facebook launched a version for high school students. Friends Reunited, now with 15 million members, was sold to the British television company ITV. YouTube began storing and retrieving videos. There were more than 8 billion Web pages. 2006 MySpace was the most popular social networking site in the U.S. However, based on monthly unique visitors, Facebook would take away that lead later, in 2008. Twitter was launched as a social networking and microblogging site, enabling members to send and receive 140-character messages called tweets. Facebook membership was expanded and opened to anyone over age 13. Google had indexed more than 25 billion web pages, 400 million queries per day, 1.3 billion images, and more than a billion Usenet messages.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING 2007 Microsoft bought a stake in Facebook. Facebook initiated Facebook Platform which let third-party developers create applications (apps) for the site. Facebook launched its Beacon advertising system, which exposed user purchasing activity. Beacon sent data from external websites to Facebook so targeted advertisements could be presented. The civic action group MoveOn.org and many others protested it as an invasion of privacy. Beacon was shut down in 2009. Apple released the iPhone multimedia and Internet smartphone. 2008 Facebook surpassed MySpace in the total number of monthly unique visitors. Meanwhile, Facebook tried unsuccessfully to buy Twitter. Bebo was purchased by AOL. Later, AOL would re-sell the relatively-unsuccessful social media site. 2009 Facebook ranked as the most-used social network worldwide with more than 200 million. The site's traffic was twice that of MySpace. Citizen journalists everywhere were electrified when Twitter broke a hard news story about a plane crash in the Hudson River. The New York Times later reported a user on a ferry had sent a tweet, "There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy." Unfriend was the New Oxford American Dictionary word of the year. Microsoft's Bing joined Yahoo and Google as major search engines on the Internet. ITV sold the relatively-unsuccessful Friends Reunited social media site to Brightsolid Limited. It's estimated that a quarter of Earth's population used the Internet. Google saw one trillion unique URLs – after eliminating duplicate entries. The Internet had at least 27 billion web pages and could have had as many as 58 billion web pages. They changed so many times a day it was nearly impossible to count. 2010 Facebook's rapid growth moved it above 400 million users, while MySpace users declined to 57 million users, down from a peak of about 75 million. To compete with Facebook and Twitter, Google launched Buzz, a social networking site integrated with the company's Gmail. It was reported that in the first week, millions of Gmail users created 9 million posts. Apple released the iPad tablet computer with advanced multimedia and Internet capabilities. AOL sold the relatively-unsuccessful Bebo social media site to Criterion Capital Partners. The Democratic National Committee advertised for a social networks manager to oversee President Barack Obama's accounts on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. It was estimated the population of Internet users was 1.97 billion. That was almost 30 percent of the global population. The Internet had surpassed newspapers as a primary way for Americans to get news, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The Internet was the third most popular news platform, with many users looking to social media and personalized feeds for news. National and

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING local TV stations were strong, but the Internet was ahead of national and local newspapers. 2011 Social media were accessible from virtually anywhere and had become an integral part of our daily lives with more than 550 million people on Facebook, 65 million tweets sent through Twitter each day, and 2 billion video views every day on YouTube. LinkedIn has 90 million professional users. Social media commerce was on the rise along with mobile social media via smartphones and tablet computers. Public sharing of so much personal information via social media sites raised concern over privacy. Apple introduced the Ping social network for music and integrated with iTunes. Both MySpace and Bebo were redesigned and updated to compete with the far more successful social networks Facebook and Twitter. It was estimated Internet users would double by 2015 to a global total of some four billion users, or nearly 60 percent of Earth's population. 2012 Ever more people are connecting to the Internet for longer periods of time. Some 2 billion people around the world use the Internet and social media, while 213 million Americans use the Internet via computers while 52 million use the Web via smartphone and 55 million use it via tablets. People also connect to the Internet via handheld music players, game consoles, Internet-enabled TVs and e-readers. It is estimated Internet users would double by 2015 to a global total of some four billion users, or nearly 60 percent of Earth's population. Social media has come of age with more people using smartphones and tables to access social networks. New sites emerge and catch on. The top ten social networks are Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, Wordpress, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr, MySpace and Wikia. More than half of adults 25-34 use social media at the office. Almost a third of young adults 18-24 use social media in the bathroom. All use social networks to stay connected with acquaintances, be informed and be amused. Advertisers look to social "likes" to enhance brand visibility. Facebook reached a billion users in 2012. YouTube has more than 800 million users each month with more than 1 trillion views per year or around 140 views for every person on Earth. Seventy percent of YouTube traffic comes from outside the U.S. YouTube is local in 43 countries and uses 60 languages. Some 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute with more than 4 billion hours of video watched each month on YouTube. Apple closed the Ping social network in 2012 and improved iTunes. Public sharing of so much personal information via social media continues to elevate privacy concerns. 2013 YouTube topped one billion monthly users with 4 billion views per day, and launched paid channels to provide content creators with a means of earning revenue. Facebook user total climbed to 1.11 billion. Twitter had 500 million registered users, with more than 200 million active. Apple's customers have downloaded over 50 billion apps and the company again improved iTunes, even as iPads were revolutionizing social games. Yahoo purchased Tumblr blogging-social media network, with 170 million users and 100 million blogs.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Flickr had 87 million users and stored 8 billion photos, while Instagram had 100 million users storing 4 billion photos. LinkedIn had 225 million users, while MySpace had 25 million users. Pinterest had 48.7 million users, while WordPress hosted 74 million blogs. Dropbox had more than 100 million users with 1 billion files uploaded daily. Google+ had 343 million users. Reddit had 69.9 million monthly users, with 4.8 billion monthly page views. The People's Liberation Army of China and the Syrian Electronic Army rose among the gaggle of infamous hackers. Privacy concerns continued over public sharing of personal information on social networks. There were 156 million blogs. Blogs, online videos and podcasts continue to be staples for marketers. An Australian survey found 34 percent of social network users logged on at work, 13 percent at school, and 18 percent in the car, while 44 percent used social networks in bed, 7 percent in the bathroom, and 6 percent in the toilet. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station regularly tweeted live from space to a global audience.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Appendix B History 1200 - Test 2-a

Name________________________

III. Multiple Choice (circle the letter of the correct answer) 1. America’s involvement in the Spanish-American War was caused by all of the following EXCEPT: a. The brutal treatment of Cubans at the hands of the Spanish. b. The sinking of the Maine. c. The decision by McKinley to annex the Philippines. d. “yellow journalism” that sensationalized events in Cuba and shaped public opinion. 2. Theodore Roosevelt’s reforms and accomplishments including all of the following EXCEPT: a. The Meat Inspection Act. b. The Payne-Aldrich tariff. c. Suing monopolies under the Sherman Antitrust Act. d. Settling the Anthracite Coal Strike. 3. “White Man’s Burden” was a. a slogan used by white supremacists in the Election of 1896. b. what Christians used to explain evolution in the late 1800s. c. the official American stance toward Cubans after the Spanish-American War. d. a poem by Rudyard Kipling that implicitly urged America to annex the Philippines and become an imperial power. 4. The Taft administration’s foreign policy of using investments to stabilize Latin America instead of the military was called a. “Dollar Diplomacy.” b. the “Taft Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. c. “White Man’s Burden.” d. “Bankers over Bullets.” 5. “Muckrakers” were a. investigative journalists who exposed corruption in business and government. b. practitioners of tabloid-style “yellow journalism.” c. Progressive politicians mainly concerned with immigration. d. the nickname of Theodore Roosevelt’s cabinet members. 6. The Federal Reserve Act was designed to a. weaken American banks by having the government take them over. b. strengthen American businesses by lowering interest rates. c. enforce the Sherman Anti-trust Act. d. stabilize America’s currency, address economic downturns, and standardize banking. 7. The Election of 1896 was a bellwether for American Gilded Age politics because a. there was a real, obvious difference in party platforms (Gold vs Silver: the currency issue) b. Republicans finally won a presidential election. c. the Populist Party candidate finished in second place. d. it proved to be a referendum on labor issues, in the wake of the Railroad Strike of 1877.

8. The Populist Party made a big impact as a third party because

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING a. its candidate won the presidential election of 1892. b. its platform addressed issues (income inequality, taxes, regulation, agriculture) that the other two parties seemed unwilling to address. . c. it successfully blamed unions for the labor violence of the 1890s. . d. it was the first party to argue for women’s rights..

9. William Jennings Bryan was all of the below EXCEPT a. an electrifying public speaker. b. a three-time Democratic nominee for President who campaigned via “whistle stop.” c. a staunch advocate for the free coinage of silver in the 1896 election. d. the winner of the 1900 election. 10. The Underwood-Simmons Tariff a. Made German products illegal during World War One. b. Finally made it legal for immigrants to own import-export companies. c. Finally raised the tariff, after decades of free trade. d. Greatly reduced many tariffs, which was a goal of many Progressives. 11. The election of 1912 featured all of the below candidates EXCEPT: a. Theodore Roosevelt. b. Woodrow Wilson. c. William Jennings Bryan. d. William Howard Taft. 12. The sinking of the Lusitania is important because a. it turned public opinion against Germany and exposed a rift between Wilson and Bryan. b. America immediately declared war in 1915 right after it occurred. c. it was yet another example of French hostility toward Americans. d. it was a direct result of the Zimmerman Telegram. 13. His writings on the importance of naval power greatly influenced world leaders, including American presidents. a. Mark Twain. b. Rudyard Kipling. c. Alfred Thayer Mahan. d. William McKinley. 14. The Haymarket Bombings a. were the violent spark that started the 1877 Railroad Strike. b. resulted in the arrest of several labor radicals and weakened unions further. c. were planned by the National Guard, and ended the Homestead Strike. d. were an attack on hay farms in Maine, planned by radical anarchists. 15. Andrew Carnegie’s refusal to acknowledge collective bargaining a. was rare for a Gilded Age industrialist. b. was an idea he got personally and secretly from Herbert Spencer in a series of letters championing social Darwinism. c. resulted in an AFL affiliated craft union to begin the strike at Homestead in 1892. d. was held up by the Supreme Court in the Santa Clara railroad case.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Appendix C

History 1200 Test #1 Study Guide Date: February 7 Format: The test will have 15 multiple choice questions, 10 true/false questions, 10 matching questions, 5 fill-inthe blank questions, and one essay question (the essay question will be worth 20 points and you will have a choice of at least two different questions to choose from). All questions will be derived from the following terms:

Radical Republicans The Homestead Act Andrew Johnson 14th Amendment Ulysses S. Grant Election of 1876 United States vs Cruikshank The Santa Clara Railroad Case Myth/Reality in Westward Expansion Bureau of Indian Affairs The Dawes Severalty Act Railroads (and Their Impact on America) American Federation of Labor “Liberty of Contract” Homestead Strike Pullman Strike Grover Cleveland Horatio Alger The Populist Party

The Freedmen’s Bureau Abraham Lincoln Black Codes Sharecropping Ku Klux Klan Plessy vs Ferguson The Slaughter House Cases The Colfax Massacre The Homestead Act Western Industries Sources of American Industrial Growth Social Darwinism “Laissez-Faire” The Haymarket Affair Great Railroad Strike of 1877 Party Politics in the Gilded Age Urbanization Andrew Carnegie William Jennings Bryan

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Appendix D Social Media Survey - Students Would you please take about 12 minutes to fill out this survey? The information will be confidential and will be used to help RMU improve social media usage and understanding. 1) Which of the following best describes you? a full-time student a part-time student 2) Which of the following best describes you? Resident student Commuter student Online student 3) What year are you in at RMU? First or second semester freshman First or second semester sophomore First or second semester junior First or second semester senior 4) Did you have a Twitter account prior to this course? Yes No

5) Awareness of Social Media Blogs Facebook

Flickr Google Instagram LinkedIn Pinterest Twitter You + Tube

Which of the following social media sites have you heard of? Which of the following social media sites are you currently using? 6) Choose the answer which best describes how often you utilized Twitter for THIS COURSE UNIT. More than once per hour Hourly More than once per day

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Daily 1 - 5 times per week A few times per month Never 7) Choose the answer which best describes how often you shared information (Tweeted) on Twitter for THIS COURSE UNIT. More than once per hour Hourly More than once per day Daily 1 - 5 times per week A few times per month Never 8) Choose the answer which best describes how often you checked your Twitter Feed for information related to THIS COURSE UNIT. More than once per hour Hourly More than once per day Daily 1 - 5 times per week A few times per month Never 9) Please indicate your agreement with the following statements:

Strongly Agree

Agree

Neutral

I was more engaged in this class unit than other courses I am enrolled in. I interacted more with peers in this course unit than other courses I am enrolled in. I thought Twitter served as a

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Disagree

Strongly Disagree

UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING better collaborative tool than blackboard discussion threads I would like to see Twitter implemented into other courses in a similar manner. Twitter was easy for me to use and understand.

10) Choose the answer which best describes how often you use social media for SCHOOLWORK.

More than Hourly once per hour

More than Daily once per day

1-5 times a A few times Monthly or Never week a month less

All social media Facebook LinkedIn Twitter Blogs/Wikis Google+ YouTube

11) What other social media do you use on a regular basis for SCHOOLWORK?

_____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________

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12) Choose the answer which best describes how often you use social media for PERSONAL USE.

More than Hourly More than Daily 1-5 times a A few times Monthly Never once per hour once per day week a month or less All social media Facebook LinkedIn Twitter Blogs/Wikis Google+ YouTube 13) What other social media do you use on a regular basis for PERSONAL USE? _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________

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14) Choose the answer which best describes how often you use social media for PROFESSIONAL USE (finding a job, interviewing, networking, etc.)

More than once per hour

Hourly More than Daily 1-5 times a A few times Monthly Never once per day week a month or less

All social media Facebook LinkedIn Twitter Blogs/Wikis Google+ YouTube

15) What other social media do you use for PROFESSIONAL USE? _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________

16) What topics relating to social media would you like to learn more about? _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________

17) What recommendations do you have for RMU with respect to the use of social media?

_____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________

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18) Have you ever heard of an inappropriate use of social media at RMU? If so, please explain.

_____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________

19) When using social media, how concerned are you about each of the following? Please choose the number which best describes your level of concern about that issue.

1=Not at all concerned

2=Somewhat concerned

3=Concerned 4=Very concerned

Privacy issues? Improper use of protected material (authorship, trademarks, etc.)? The use of your social media information by other students at RMU? The use of your social media information by students at other schools? The use of your social media information by RMU faculty? The use of your social media information by RMU administrators? The use of your social media information by prospective employers?

20) What other concerns do you have about social media at RMU?

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________

21) THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS ARE FOR CLASSIFICATION PURPOSES ONLY. What is your gender? Male Female 22) What is your age group? Under 18 18-20 21-23 24-26 27-29 30-34 35-39 40-49 50-59 60+ 23) Are you a transfer student? Yes No 24) Approximately what percentage of time you use the following devices for social media? Desktop computer ___________________________________ Laptop computer ___________________________________ Tablet ___________________________________ Smart phone ___________________________________ Other ___________________________________ 25) What kind of smartphone do you own? I don't have a smartphone. Apple

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Android Other (please specify) ______________________________________________________________________

26) From which school are you getting your degree? School of Business School of Communications and Information Systems School of Education and Social Sciences School of Engineering, Mathematics and Science School of Nursing and Health Sciences I am getting a degree from more than one school. 27) What is your major in the School of Business? Choose one. Bachelor of Science in Accounting Bachelor of Science in Economics Bachelor of Science in Finance Bachelor of Science in Hospitality and Tourism Management Bachelor of Science in Management Bachelor of Science in Marketing Bachelor of Science in Sport Management Bachelor of Science - double major Other (please specify)

If you selected other, please specify ______________________________________________________________________ 28) Which department in the School of Communications and Information Systems do you expect to receive your degree from? Choose one. Department of Communications Department of Computer and Information Systems Department of English Studies and Communication Skills Department of Organizational Leadership Department of Media Arts Other (please specify)

If you selected other, please specify ______________________________________________________________________

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING 29) What is your major in the Department of Communications? Choose one. Bachelor of Arts in Communication - Advertising Bachelor of Arts in Communication - Applied Journalism Bachelor of Arts in Communication - Communication Studies Bachelor of Arts in Communication - Corporate Communication Bachelor of Arts in Communication - Public Relations Bachelor of Arts in Communication - Theater Bachelor of Arts in Communication and English Education - Teacher Education Undergraduate double major Other (please specify)

If you selected other, please specify ______________________________________________________________________

30) What is your major in the Department of Computer and Information Systems? Choose one. Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Systems Bachelor of Science in Information Sciences Bachelor of Science in Cyber Forensics and Information Security Bachelor of Science in Competitive Intelligence Systems Bachelor of Science in Professional Communications and Information Systems Undergraduate double major Other (please specify)

If you selected other, please specify ______________________________________________________________________ 31) What is your major in the Department of Organizational Leadership? Choose one. Bachelor of Science in Organizational Leadership Undergraduate double major Other (please specify)

If you selected other, please specify ______________________________________________________________________

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32) What is your major in the Department of Media Arts? Choose one. Bachelor of Fine Arts - Graphic Design Bachelor of Fine Arts - Photography Bachelor of Fine Arts - Television/Video Production Bachelor of Fine Arts - Web Design Bachelor of Arts - Graphic Design Bachelor of Arts - Photography Bachelor of Arts - Television/Video Production Bachelor of Arts - Web Design Undergraduate double major Other (please specify)

If you selected other, please specify ______________________________________________________________________

33) Which department in the School of Engineering, Mathematics, and Science do you expect to receive your degree from? Choose one. Department of Engineering Department of Mathematics Department of Science Other (please specify)

If you selected other, please specify ______________________________________________________________________ 34) What is your major in the Department of Engineering? Choose one. Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering Bachelor of Science in Manufacturing Engineering Undergraduate double major Other (please specify)

If you selected other, please specify ______________________________________________________________________

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING 35) What is your major in the Department of Mathematics? Choose one. Bachelor of Arts in Math Bachelor of Science in Actuarial Science Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics Undergraduate double major Other (please specify)

If you selected other, please specify ______________________________________________________________________ 36) What is your major in the Department of Science? Choose one. Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Science Bachelor of Science in Biology Bachelor of Science in Environmental Science Undergraduate double major Other (please specify)

If you selected other, please specify ______________________________________________________________________ 37) What is your major in the School of Education and Social Sciences? Choose one. Bachelor of Science in Teacher Certification Undergraduate double major Bachelor of Arts in History Bachelor of Arts in Psychology Bachelor of Arts in Social Science Bachelor of Science in Psychology Bachelor of Science in Social Science Other (please specify)

If you selected other, please specify ______________________________________________________________________

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING 38) What is your major in the School of Nursing and Health Sciences? Choose one. Bachelor of Science in Nursing Bachelor of Science in Nuclear Medicine Undergraduate double major Other (please specify)

If you selected other, please specify ______________________________________________________________________ Thank you for filling out the survey!

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Appendix E Semi-Scripted Faculty Interview Questions 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

What are your thoughts on social media? What type of experience did you have with social media prior to this unit? Did you have any concerns with incorporating Twitter into your classroom? Did you find the experience enjoyable? Did you notice any impact on student learning that you would attribute to Twitter? Did you notice any impact on student engagement that you would attribute to Twitter? Did you have any specific technological problems that arose throughout the unit? What did you like the least about incorporating Twitter into your class? What did you observe? What did you learn? What would you have done differently if you had the opportunity?

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Appendix F

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Appendix G Consent Form: Robert Morris University Consent to Participate in Research Twitter in the Classroom: Determining the Effectiveness of Utilizing a Microblog for Distributed Practice in Concept Learning You are invited to participate in a research study conducted by Armand A. Buzzelli. Your participation in this study is completely voluntary. Please review the information below, ask questions, and have any clarifications addressed prior to signing the agreement. You may contact me via email at [email protected]. The sample group for this research will include students and faculty from Robert Morris University. Purpose of the Study: The purpose of this study is to determine the effectiveness of utilizing Twitter as an instructional tool that may potentially aid in concept learning in a college history course. The mobility and efficient word limit makes Twitter a potentially effective candidate to be used in distributed practice, which research has shown to be effective in concept learning. Procedures: 1. The research design is a mixed method approach, with a quantitative portion that will compare the results of concept testing within a standard unit exam in multiple choice format. 2. Students who participate in the Twitter will complete a web based survey that will ask them to respond to questions based on their experiences using Twitter within the course.assignment 3. Faculty will be interviewed to collect qualitative information on their experience as facilitators of social media within the classroom. Informed Consent: 1. This research is conducted at the discretion of Robert Morris University. The use of any names may be used with consent in publication. If consent is not given, the research may be published however the University name and departments will not be named and will be addressed by a generic name or code. 2. No part of this research is being funded by a public, private, or government source. Confidentiality: 1. For the purpose of this research, no names will be collected, numbers (codes) will be assigned to all participants to maintain confidentiality. Participation and Withdraw: Participating in this study is strictly voluntary. Refusal to participate in this study will not involve penalty, loss of position or status, or any benefits you are otherwise entitled. You may withdraw from this research study at any time with or without reason. This study aims to collect research study at any time with or without reason. This study aims to collect research in a minimally intrusive manner during otherwise scheduled coursework.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING If you have any questions regarding this research, or your rights regarding this research, please contact the Institutional Review Board (IRB) Administrative Coordinator, Lisa P. Nauman, Patrick Henry 200, [email protected], or (412) 397-6227. Name of Participant (Please Print)___________________________________________________ Signature of Participant __________________________________Date_____________________ Name of Witness (Please Print)_____________________________________________________ Signature of Witness ____________________________________Date_____________________ Signature of Researcher __________________________________Date____________________

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Appendix H

Part 1 of 4: Tweet and Gather Followers

1 Go to Twitter.com[2] and sign up for a free account. Do so by entering your name, email address, and desired password in the provided space.

2 Learn the Twitter lingo and use it appropriately. Tweet - a Twitter single update of 140-characters or less, which can include @Mentions to other users, hashtags, external links, or simply regular text. ● Retweet or "RT" - taking a tweet from one user and posting it yourself, automatically crediting the source, so that all of your followers can see the tweet. The original retweeting style would take a tweet and re-post it via your own account in the following format: 'RT @(username of person who originally tweeted the tweet you're retweeting): (contents of tweet)'. The current system does away with this format, and instead directly re-posts the tweet, crediting the origin underneath. For example, 'retweeted from @username'. ● TweetUps - Using Twitter to meet with other Twitter folks. ● Trending Topics (TTs) - "Trending Topics" lists a range of subjects which many users across Twitter are talking about simultaneously. When Twitter first got started, "Trending Topics" were those which were most popular during the span of the entire previous week. But new, more advanced algorithms have now made it easier to detect recent trends, and cite the very latest most-talked-about subjects. These days, the "Trending Topics" list contains things that thousands of people across the whole of Twitter are discussing at any one time. When you click on a Trending Topic in the list, it will bring up a range of tweets, mentioning each matter of interest, and for each Trending Topic there will be up to three 'Top Tweets' highlighted--Those are the tweets in each topic which have been retweeted more than 150 times. You can view a list of trends in your area in the right-hand column of the homepage.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING o

o

Lists - Users can organize the people they follow into lists of businesses or personalities which are related in some way. For example, a user could list all of the NPOs and charities they follow into a single list, for easy reference. Promoted Tweets - A single trending topic which a company or organization can pay to 'trend', as to gain attention and traffic from Twitter users worldwide.

3 Tweet. If you want to let your followers know what you are doing, type it into the 'What's happening?' text box and then click on the 'Tweet' button. Note that tweets are limited to 140-characters or less; otherwise, the "Tweet" button will go into a minus. ● As you type, a countdown is offered to help you keep track of the character count of your tweets. The allowed characters are in gray, then the last 10 go red, and then a red minus symbol appears when you are past the zero (0) indicator.

4 Use hashtags. Prefacing a word with a '#' will create a hashtag. A hashtag makes a certain word easily searchable. For more information on hashtags see the wikiHow article on How to use Hashtags with Twitter. For our course most of the dialogue you see will be accompanied with the Hashtag #RMUHistory1200. ● Some Trending topics will include hashtags, thus making it easier for users to tap into a Twitterwide conversation regarding a single matter of interest. ● A prime example of the usage of hashtags can be seen with Major League Baseball, which uses team-name hashtags (#Mets, for example) to pull together lists of in-game tweets, which they display on their website.

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5 Gather Followers. Your Twitter can be as intimate or as big as you choose. If your goal is to gather lots of followers, though, be sure to keep your posts interesting and relevant. You shouldn't underestimate the power of following others, either—often times if you follow someone they'll follow you back. Finally, give your favorite followers shout outs occasionally. This could be through direct tweets, blogs, or a simple #FF (#FollowFriday) mechanism. This is where you tweet a short list of your key followers who you think would be good for others to follow and include the hashtag #FF, they are generally sent out at the end of the week hence the name. This will often be reciprocated, meaning your name gets circulated. However, #FollowFridays are going out of fashion and many commentators question their worth due to their spam-like nature. A simple RT (re-tweet) can be a very effective way of attracting followers. Retweets are a real time affirmation of someone else's statement and is often rewarded with a follow.

6 Check the replies from your followers that are directed at you. Click '@Mentions' to see if there are any replies to any of your 'tweets'. When tweeting, using '@' followed by a username (with no spaces) in your tweet will send a mention to the user you choose. For example, '@username' will send a mention to 'username', and the entire tweet will show up in his '@mentions' section. 7 Decide your own style and times for tweeting. Twitter, like many social media applications, can become addicting and time-sucking. Make a decision early on about how much time you will devote to it and about how big your "tribe" of followers will be. Avoid worrying about getting heaps of followers; that's competitive rather than relating and it will end up wearing you out. Instead, focus on quality connections and information-sharing and don't get too upset when someone unfollows you; it happens and

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING you can't change it. If you feel Twitter is overwhelming at any time, simply take a break from it and come back later, refreshed.

● ●

Anthropological and sociological studies have claimed time and again that we can only cope with being part of a tribe of 150 to 200 people.[4] Anything more than that and we get confused and lose the intimacy of connection. Keep that in mind when aiming for too many followers! Read How to avoid a Twitter addiction and How to defeat a Twitter addiction if relevant!

Part 2 of 4: Find and Organize People You Follow 1 Figure out who to follow. You will probably find that you know quite a few people on Twitter. For the purposes of this course you will follow @RMUHistory1200. Using the menu tab on your page click on 'Who to Follow', and there are several ways to find people on Twitter, as follows:

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING ● ● ●

Use the 'Find Friends' link to find people you know through your various Gmail,AOL, MSN, Hotmail and Yahoo! accounts. Use the 'View suggestions' link for a wide range of possibilities that may, or may not, connect with your interests. (Twitter is also working on personalizing lists of suggested followers, so keep an eye out for the feature.) Use the 'Browse Interests' tab to find people by interest.

2 Look for people from organizations that you are in or for those that share a common interest. There are many business, companies, celebrities, and non-profit organizations on Twitter, ranging from Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) to Greenpeace (@greenpeace). 3 Create lists. If you're following lots of people, it can get hard to sift through all the tweets. For easy reference, you can organize the people you follow into a list. To add someone to a list, go to their profile. Then, click the person icon in the toolbar and select "Add to List." A menu with your lists will pop up; you can choose to create a new list or add the person to an existing one.

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Part 3 of 4: Set Up Your Profile

1 Upload a profile picture. This picture will be displayed with your name across the site. It must be a JPG, GIF, or PNG file and must be smaller than 700 KB. To do so, click on "settings" in the drop down

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING menu below your username. Then click on "Choose File" to select a file from your computer.

2 Add your name, location, and website. Under your profile picture, you have the choice to enter your full name. Adding a full name allows you to keep a professional aspect regardless of your username. You can also enter a location to let people know where you're tweeting from and link to your homepage or blog if you desire. 3 Work on your pithy 'bio'. Make it eye-catching and interesting. Do it just right and it will help you build up followers; people thinking of following you do read the biographies to see if they have reason to follow you. Bear in mind that a biography can be up to 160 characters long, so you'll have to keep it short and to the point. Don't worry about typing your real name or website URL here—those can both be entered separately (as shown in the previous step).

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING 4 Decide whether you want your tweets to be posted to Facebook. This can give you more view per tweet. If you so desire, click the "Posts your Tweets to Facebook" button at the bottom of the profile page.

5 Edit your language and timezone. Under the "Account" tab of settings, you have the ability change the language and timezone that your Twitter is in. Do so by selecting the desired language and timezone from the drop down menus. You can also change your username and email address here if you ever need

to.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING 6 Check the box below time zone to add a location to each of your Tweets. This is different than the location on your profile—it is specific to each tweet and can be as general as a town or as specific as your exact location. Even when this feature is enabled, you have the option to turn it on or off with each individual tweet.

7 Review the Tweet Media and Privacy settings. These are listed under the Account tab of your settings. Check the applicable boxes and hit save.

8 Change your password periodically. Protect your account by periodically changing your password. To do so, click on the "Password" tab under Settings. Enter your old password, then your new one twice. Hit "Change" when finished.

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9 Decide when you want to receive emails from Twitter. Under the "Notifications" tab, there is a list of actions. Check the boxes next to those actions for which you'd like to receive an email.

10 Customize your profile. Every profile begins with the default background and color scheme. However, you can personalize it if you wish. Click on the "Design" tab of Settings. You can choose from one of the background images provided, or upload your own by clicking on the button that says "Change Background Image." Then, click on "Choose File" to upload one from your computer. You can also play with the color scheme by clicking "Change Design Colors."

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Part 4 of 4: Using the Other Features

1 Send DMs. DMs are direct messages. They go straight to the intended person that you are messaging. The DM feature uses an inbox and outbox system, but you are still limited to using 140-characters; you are also limited to sending DMs to only those users who follow you. DMs cannot be seen by anyone other than yourself and the chosen recipient, and are thus more personal. To send a DM, go to the page of the follower you're sending one to, and click on the "Message" box. ● Be aware that some people really dislike DMs on Twitter because they reason that Twitter is an open conversation and a fast one, not a disguise for sending each other private messages. Also, DMs are not appreciated when they involve marketing or advertising.

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2 Use third-party applications for ease of mobility and account sharing. Third-party applications such as TweetDeck and Twhirl (desktop), Twitter for iPhone (iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad), or Twidroid (Android) can help you to manage your Twitter account(s) better. If you have lots of followers and if you follow lots of people, at which point it can be difficult to keep up with everything on Twitter's official website, you might want to try something a bit more advanced like Hoot Suite or Blossome.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Appendix I Screenshot of Shared Google Doc used for Creating Review Tweets

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Appendix J Screenshot of Scheduled Tweets through HootSuite

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Appendix K Sample Terms from Traditional Study Guide Developed from Tweets

Haymarket Bombings 

The 1886 Haymarket Bombings caused riots to break out during labor a Chicago labor strike



The Haymarket Bombing incident DID NOT help to strengthen the Knights of Labor



Employers fought back by getting court orders against trespassing strikers or those obstructing traffic

Homestead Strike 

The AFL led by Samuel Gompers used collective bargaining to negotiate between management and union reps



Carnegie avoided bargaining collectively by announcing his Homestead plant would negotiate individually



Early collective bargaining by AFL met the needs of skilled labor - not unskilled, blacks, and women

Populist Party 

One populist leader stated that “the great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master”



The populist party DID NOT primarily consist of wealthy aristocrats that were determined to maintain social inequities



Populist party leaders were powerful speakers who were able to mobilize farmers, laborers, and poor people

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Appendix L Schedule for Tweets by Concept

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Appendix M Interview Transcription with Faculty Member Researcher:

Before the study, what were some of your general thoughts about social media? Have you used it before? What was your experience with it?

Instructor:

I've used it a lot. I have a Facebook page. I have a Twitter account. I've used it as a citizen or whatever, not necessarily as a professor. I … the only way that it's really worked in terms of my career is I network with other faculty and things like that via Facebook and have some conversations about teaching and that sort of stuff. It's all been very formal. I honestly never … I know of other teachers who have used assignments and classes using social media, but I never had tried that myself before.

Researcher:

Did you have any concerns with incorporating Twitter into your classroom, anything that you had reservations about?

Instructor:

Not necessarily reservations. The one thing I was concerned with was always going to be a fairness aspect. If we were going to give the kids … half the class Twitter information, I had to make sure as a teacher that the other half of the class gets the same information. That's always the issue. Obviously when you teach is that everyone has to get the same opportunity. That wasn't necessarily a problem with social media. That was just something that we had to resolve within the study. We obviously did.

Researcher:

Did you find the experience enjoyable using social media? Was it interesting?

Instructor:

It was definitely interesting. It was fun to watch you try to capture a lot of historical information in 140-characters. I'm sure that was challenging for you too to a certain extent.

Researcher:

Absolutely.

Instructor:

It actually went better than I thought. It's funny. One of the things I think is kind of dumb about Twitter is that it limits you to 140-characters. As a historian, we can't shut up. It's hard for us to write anything that's that short. Going through the tweets and watching you create them and helping you with them and things like that, it was funny. You actually … they really did capture a certain amount of information. It's one of those things where you have to reinforce it. You can't use it as scaffolding for the class. In terms of what was conveyed on the tweets, it went better than I probably would have expected it to be. They contained more information than I would have guessed they could've.

Researcher:

Yeah, that's good. Did you notice any impact on student learning that you would attribute to Twitter? Did you have any interaction where students even commented on using Twitter?

Instructor:

Honesty, very little. I’m not necessarily sure that that was because they didn't get anything out it so much as it is this is a freshman level survey course. The vast majority of the students are not history majors. The level of interest in the material is lower than other types of history classes I teach. That's just a general issue that any teacher faces in these kind of courses.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING It also was a 2:00 PM class. Two o'clock PM. classes are notorious for students [vegging 00:03:05] out after eating lunch. That may have had something to do with it. Those classes, whatever you do in them, it's harder to engage. If anyone had ever did a study on what's the optimal time to teach a course, 11 AM is always the one I think is the best in terms of student engagement. I would ask every once in a while. I didn't want to interfere too much with the experiment. I wanted to let it do its own thing. I'd ask people if they were reading the tweets. You get some nods and things like that. I never … there weren't a lot of comments one way or the other. Researcher:

Let's see here. Did you find that there were any technology problems that arose during the class? Where there any issues that you were aware of where the students didn’t receive the tweets? It sounds like just from that last comment that there wasn't a whole lot of problems ….

Instructor:

No, there weren't. The other funny thing was whenever the first week of class and I asked people if they had Twitter accounts, every single person in the course raised their hand that they did with one exception. The one exception was the only adult student in the class who was in his thirties or even forties. He also said, "Oh, I can easily create a Twitter account. It won’t be a problem." He did. That was actually really easy. It was amazing to me how many people use Twitter. I didn't realize that.

Researcher:

From a user friendliness aspect it wasn't a ….

Instructor:

Yeah, obviously what makes Twitter and Facebook and those kinds of things so popular and successful is that they are obviously incredibly easy to access and to do. That part of the experiment we could start up in the blink of an eye.

Researcher:

What was do you think the weakest part of this experiment? What did you like least about this idea? Another way to word it is how would you suggest strengthening or changing this if we did it in the future?

Instructor:

One of the things that we would probably need to do would be to either … this was … since this was a pilot experiment, we were trying to measure learning outcomes we only had half the class use Twitter. The other half did not. The half of the class that did not use Twitter we would give them that study guide. One of the things, this is really my fault, is I didn't pay attention to when we were giving it to them. If I did it again, this is a really minor thing, I would give the … if we did it the same way, where there was half a class that did not receive the tweets, I would have given them the Twitter study guide so to speak the same day I gave them the real study guide. I'm not even sure that that had anything to do with any of our outcomes at all. No, it was really good. If anything in the future, we might want to add more, really incorporate. I'm not really sure that this study proved that Twitter is the cause necessarily of improvement or not … or… not improvement. If you did it in the future, or we did it in the future, we really committed to a larger, more tweets, more samples, more concepts and really maybe try to figure out a way to measure students reading them. I don’t know how we would do that. That might strengthen it or it might not. That's just me guessing.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Researcher:

One of the things that I found is that the account being set to private prevented re-tweets and mentions and things like that to that account. Is that something that if we were to change may help build some of that engagement [crosstalk 00:06:48].

Instructor:

Yeah, and the other thing that you can do in the future is the tweets that we did were reinforcing lecture concepts. They weren't really open to discussion. Even if we did set the account in a different way and allow people to re-tweet them, and even talk about them, there wouldn't be a lot of discussion. We were just sending them … this is factual information. Then here's some information that's not factual, so you learn better that way. What we could do in the future is to turn it into a discussion tool. We learn a historical concept or some major historical event and we want students to analyze it. The tweet is a question and then to see how they respond that way. The issue with that is there's already ways that you can do discussions on the Internet in a class without Twitter if there's a discussion going on in Blackboard and that kind of thing. I'm not really sure how a Twitter would supplement that or improve upon that apart from the fact that students are there. You're meeting them where they already are as we learned now on Twitter accounts.

Researcher:

This might be something for a more advanced history class. One of the things I thought about is I actually learned a lot about history creating these tweets. Would that be a possible …

Instructor:

That's a really good point, too, yeah, absolutely. I actually thought about that. One of the … I mentioned earlier that a couple of my friends have tried using social media in the past. One of my friends on Facebook had some kind of an assignment where she made the students pretend that they were a historical figure. For a week or so they had to update their Facebook profile based on what that historical figure would do. Obviously it's silly in a sense that Napoleon Bonaparte doesn't have social media in the 1800's. It was just the idea of trying to use social media to meet them where they are. Yeah, it could be something along those lines, too.

Researcher:

All right. That is actually all of my questions. I appreciate your help.

Instructor:

Cool.

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Appendix N Open Ended Question Responses and Coding What other social media do you use on a regular basis for SCHOOLWORK? ID Response

Initial Code

Code

6

Discussion boards

Discussion boards

Discussion Boards

4

Blackboard discussions for group projects is beneficial for student discussions and is less of a hassle than email. Pinterest helps when creating projects and and crafts for appealing projects.

Blackboard Discussion Board, Pinterest

Discussion Boards/Pint erest

Sources already mentioned

Not Applicable

Typically I never use social media for school work. I tend to do most of my classwork by looking for reliable sources on google or links 10 provided by teachers.

Social Media not reliable

Not reliable source

7

Piazza - New College Specific Social Media

Piazza

12 Facebook, Twiter, Youtube

Piazza

What other social media do you use on a regular basis for PERSONAL USE? ID Response

Initial Code

Code

5

Instagram

Instagram

Instagram

Instagram

3 Instagram, Pinterest

Instagram, Pinterest

Instagram, Pinterest

13 Instagram, Pinterest

Instagram, Pinterest

Instagram, Pinterest

15 Instagram, Snapchat

Instagram, Snapchat

Instagram, Snapchat

9 Pinterest

Pinterest

Pinterest

11 Pinterest

Pinterest

Pinterest

Instagram

14 Instagram - a few times per month

Pinterest to look at interesting pictures, Instagram a few times per week to see what friends and 10 family are up to, and Yahoo News for stories Pinterest, Instagram

Pinterest, Instagram

Pinterest - crafts, room decorating, finding healthy 4 recipes and exercises Pinterest

Pinterest

6 Snapchat

Snapchat

Snapchat

What other social media do you use on a regular basis for PROFESSIONAL USE? ID Response

Initial Code

Code

1

Spiceworks is IT Community, TomsHARDWAR is more of a technical news website, less social community

IT social network

Colonial Trek - but I am not sure if that is social 12 media

Job search site at university - not sure if classified as social network

job search sites

14 Indeed Jobs

job search site

job search

Spiceworks (IT Related), TomsHARDWAR

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING sites Normally I look on colonial trak or monster for 10 professional use

11 I don't think social media is professional at all.

Job search sites

job search sites

Not professional to use social media

not professiona l

What recommendations do you have for educators with respect to the use of social media? ID Comment

Initial Code

Code

Use these, it is easier for our generation to 11 understand.

Use it

Easier

12 easier interface, more reliable than blackboard

Easy to use

Easier

Helps remember

Helps students remember

It helps students remember so I would 9 recommend using it

Use it more. The Twitter helped me remember in 14 class. Use it More

Helps students remember

If you are going to use social media, use more than one form. I go on Facebook significantly 2 more than Twitter.

Use variety

More usage

6 Use it more. In class usage.

Use it more

More usage

Finding the popular site students use (Twitter) is helpful because students can effortlessly be exposed to information. So they have no choice but to study and read facts! The facts are clear and 4 simple, making them easy to grasp. Social media is very popular and students use it 8 every day

Popular Popular and Useful

If they used a format that more people know well and use constantly they would probably find it 10 easier to reach students and help them. Popular Post interesting points that are informative and 3 important.

Post useful information

7 It is a lot more useful to answer student questions Useful

Popular

Popular Quality of Information Useful

It is a good way to have students see the 13 information more than just in class

Beyond Class

Useful

16 It is useful

Useful

Useful

What topics relating to social media would you like to learn more about? ID Comment 4

Initial Code

Advertising techniques and how small businesses can grow using social media Business, advertising 7 Professional use

12 marketing, management 3 How it could be used towards schoolwork.

Code Business / Professional Use

professional uses

Business / Professional Use

marketing, management

Business / Professional Use

Education

Education

6 If social media has a positive effect on test scores Test scores, education

Education

Have you ever heard of an inappropriate use of social media at RMU? If so, please explain. ID Comment

Initial Code

162

Code

UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING

Yes, college confessions Twitter. It shows the 11 bad side of students.

students get in trouble for writing inappropriate 13 things about other students

16 The RMU Confessions Twitter account

College Confessions

College Confessions/ Inappropriate Comments

Inappropriate Comments

College Confessions/ Inappropriate Comments

College confessions

College Confessions/ Inappropriate Comments

What other concerns do you have about social media at RMU? ID Comment

Preliminary Code

Code

12 Easy to copy other's work

Cheating

Cheating

Students using vulgarity and inappropriate 6 comments

Inappropriate comments

Inappropriate comments

I feel that RMU social media should expand and programs and events will gain more interest and 4 attention.

University needs more of an expansive presence

Need stronger presence

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Appendix O Developing Categories from Faculty Interview through Focused Coding Category: Familiarity and Ease of Use Response

Initial Code

I've used it a lot. I have a Facebook page. I have a Twitter account. I've used it as a citizen or whatever, not necessarily as a professor FAMILIARITY WITH SOCIAL MEDIA The only way that it's really worked in terms of my career is I network with other faculty and things like that via Facebook and have some conversations about teaching and that sort of stuff. It's all been very formal.

PROFESSIONAL USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

The other funny thing was whenever the first week of class and I asked people if they had Twitter accounts, every single person in the course raised their hand that NEARLY ENTIRE CLASS USED they did with one exception. TWITTER ALREADY The one exception was the only adult student in the class who was in his thirties or even forties. He also said, "Oh, I can easily create a Twitter account. It won’t be a problem." He did.

TWITTER ACCOUNT EASY TO SET UP

That was actually really easy. It was amazing to me how many people use Twitter. I didn't realize that.

EASY TO GET STARTED

They are obviously incredibly easy to access and to do. That part of the experiment we could start up in the blink of an eye.

QUICK AND EASY TO ACCESS

I'm not really sure how a Twitter would supplement that or improve upon that apart from the fact that students are there. You're meeting them where they already are as we learned now on Twitter accounts.

“MEETING THEM WHERE THEY ARE”

Category: Student Engagement Rationale Honesty, very little. I’m not necessarily sure that that was because they didn't get anything out it so much as it is this is a freshman level survey course… The level of interest in the material is lower than other LITTLE INTERACTION DUE TO types of history classes I teach. CLASS LEVEL The vast majority of the students are not history majors. That's just a general issue that any teacher faces in these kind of courses

MAJORITY OF STUDENTS NOT HISTORY MAJORS

It also was a 2:00 PM class. Two o'clock PM. classes are notorious for students [vegging 00:03:05] out after eating lunch. That may have had something to do with it. CLASS TIME AFTER LUNCH Those classes, whatever you do in them, it's harder to engage. If anyone had ever did a study on what's the optimal time to teach a course, 11 AM is always the one I think is the best in terms of student engagement. TIME OF CLASS

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING They weren't really open to discussion. Even if we did set the account in a different way and allow people to re-tweet them, and even talk about them, there PRIVACY SETTINGS OF TWITTER wouldn't be a lot of discussion. ACCOUNT Category: Suggestions for Educators It's one of those things where you have to reinforce it. You can't use it as scaffolding for the class.

TWEETS SHOULD BE REINFORCED

In terms of what was conveyed on the tweets, it went better than I probably would have expected it to be. They contained more information than I would have guessed they could've.

TWEETS CAN BE INFORMATIVE

If you did it in the future, or we did it in the future, we really committed to a larger, more tweets, more samples, more concepts and really maybe try to figure SPACE PRACTICE FOR BOTH out a way to measure students reading them. GROUPS If … we did it in the future, we really committed to a larger, more tweets, more samples, more concepts

MORE TWEETS, MORE INFORMATION PROVIDED

try to figure out a way to measure students reading them.

MORE ASSESSEMENT/MEASUREMENT

What we could do in the future is to turn it into a discussion tool.

USE AS DISCUSSION TOOL

We learn a historical concept or some major historical event and we want students to analyze it. The tweet is a question and then to see how they respond that way. ASK QUESTIONS BY TWEETS One of my friends on Facebook had some kind of an assignment where she made the students pretend that they were a historical figure. For a week or so they had to update their Facebook profile based on what that HAVE STUDENTS CREATE THE historical figure would do. POSTS

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UTILIZING TWITTER FOR CONCEPT LEARNING Appendix P

RMU compared with:

RMU

Privates PA/OH/NEC

Carnegie Class

NSSE 2012

About how many hours do you spend in a typical 7-day week doing each of the following? 1=0 hrs/wk, 2=1-5 hrs/wk, 3=6-10 hrs/wk, 4=11-15 hrs/wk, 5=16-20 hrs/wk, 6=21-25 hrs/wk, 7=26-30 hrs/wk, 8=More than 30 hrs/wk

Time Usage Working for pay on campus Working for pay on campus Working for pay off campus Working for pay off campus

Freshmen

1.42

1.62 *

Seniors

1.51

Freshmen

Seniors

-.17

1.48

-.05

1.50

-.06

1.87 *** -.25

1.75 ***

-.16

1.81 ***

-.19

2.30

1.72 ***

.35

2.46

-.07

2.22

.04

4.88

3.13 ***

.67

3.94 ***

3.72 ***

.40

166

.33

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