A Decade of Research on K–12 Teaching and Teacher Learning with Social Media: Insights on the State of the Field

Abstract

Background and Context The increasingly widespread use of social media to expand one's social connections is a relatively new but important phenomenon that has implications for teaching, learning, and teachers’ professional knowledge and development in the 21st century. Educational research in this area is expanding, but further investigation is necessary to better determine how to best support teachers in their professional development, collaboration, and classroom teaching. Prior literature reviews have focused extensively on higher education settings or particular platforms or platform types (e.g., Facebook, microblogging). This article provides needed insights into K–12 settings and encompasses work from a variety of social media types. We describe a systematic review of more than a decade of educational research from various countries to present the state of the field in K–12 teachers’ use of social media for teaching and professional learning across various platforms. Research Questions To define social media's potentially beneficial roles in teaching and learning, we must first take an in-depth look at teachers’ current social media practices. Toward this end, we approached our review with the following research question: How are social media perceived and used by K–12 teachers for their teaching or professional learning, and with what impacts on teachers’ practices? Research Design Guided by Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) established standards for rigor and quality in systematic literature reviews, this article reviews empirical research to examine how social media are perceived and used by K–12 teachers with what impacts on teachers’ practices. Findings We find that social media features offer several benefits for helping teachers fulfill their goals for classroom teaching, including enhancing student engagement, community connections, and teacher–student interactions, but these affordances come with challenges that must be navigated. The literature also suggests that social media features provide benefits for teachers’ professional learning within both formal professional development programs and informal learning networks. Conclusions Implications of this literature review for future research and the design of educational practices are discussed in the final section. Among our conclusions are calls for more data triangulation between teachers’ and students’ learning and experiences on social media, more attention to teachers’ observational behaviors on social media, and further exploration of how social media facilitates interplay between teachers’ formal and informal learning.

Facebook Post Data: A Primer for Educational Research

“…A recent review study found that four of the 15-most cited articles across all articles published a decade in 65 educational technology and instructional design were on Facebook (Bodily et al, 2019). Review papers on the use of social media in education have noted the prominence of research on this platform (and the social media platform Twitter; Barrot, 2021;Greenhow et al, 2020). A systematic review of prior research on the use of Facebook has shown that the platform can have educational benefits-such as enhancing teacher-student interactions and improving students' academic achievement -as well as potential drawbacks-such as educators being more active on the platform than their students when Facebook is used as a part of courses (Chugh & Ruhi, 2018).…”

“…In these cases, the researcher must manually access and screenshot or copy and paste posts and their content into a spreadsheet or document for subsequent analysis. In this way, studies have not taken advantage of one of the key affordances of digital trace data: that it can be analyzed at a heretofore impractical scale (Greenhow et al, 2020). One study used posts on Facebook to understand what educational technologies K-12 educational institutions used.…”

“…No other platform apart from YouTube is used by as many Americans, and apart from Pinterest, no other online platform has a smaller politically partisan divide (Gramlich, 2021). In addition to being widely used, Facebook has been widely researched-including the use of Facebook in educational settings (Barrot, 2021;Chugh & Ruhi, 2018;Greenhow et al, 2020;Niu, 2019).…”

“…Using Digital Trace Data for Research Systematic reviews have shown that much of the research on the educational uses of Facebook has relied on a single research approach: self-report surveys (Niu, 2019). This issue is not exclusive to Facebook: Greenhow et al (2020) also argued that self-report survey methods are shared across research on K-12 teachers' use of social media. At the same time, Greenhow et al note that other methods, both more traditional (i.e., focus group discussions) and newer (i.e., public data mining), have complemented studies based on teachers' self-reports of their experiences with social media or the benefits they achieve from their use.…”

“…The digital trace data pointed to in the review by Greenhow et al (2020) are by no means only within the purview of a particular crop of researchers who focus on educational, social media. In addition to social media, educational researchers have used digital trace data when teachers and students use educational games and simulations (e.g., Gobert et al, 2013) and intelligent tutoring systems (e.g., Heffernan & Heffernan, 2014), alongside many other tools and platforms, like discussion platforms and assessments (Fischer et al, 2020).…”