A Meta-Analysis of Social Media & Learning Studies in Educational Research

Understanding the main focus of social media for learning studies and how they are conducted is important to understand where the research is headed. Hence, this study is aimed to explore and analyze state of the art articles that focus on both social media and learning. Meta-analysis is employed as a methodology and 152 articles published between 2008 and 2017 are investigated through content analysis. The results are interpreted with descriptive statistics. As a result, it is found that; (1) most of the studies incorporate Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for learning, (2) the majority of studies are based on students, (3) quantitative approach using surveys are frequent while case studies and experimental designs are the primary means of research method, (4) higher education is in the focus of the studies, (5) Europe contributed to the literature the most, and (6) the number of studies is increasing throughout the years.