Research Trends On The Use Of Whatsapp In Education: A Content Analysis

Abstract

The study aims to identify the trends of researches on the use of WhatsApp in education which were published between the years 2013 and 2017 and to guide researchers who are forecasting to conduct their research in the specified area to identify key areas needed for further investigation in the area. The data obtained through open source online publications like Google Scholar is presented in table using descriptive statistics in forms of frequency and percentage. The research findings show that most of the researches were carried out in 2016. It is also revealed that most of the studies were conducted on using WhatsApp for teaching languages especially English language. Similarly, the results show that majority of the studies in the area are quantitative in nature; questionnaire and test-scores are the main instruments used for data collection; a descriptive analysis method is most employed techniques of data analysis of the studies. With regard to sample group, undergraduate students were selected as research participants in most of the studies. Finally, the study offers the necessary recommendations for researchers on the use of WhatsApp in education.

Keywords: WhatsAppContent AnalysisEducational Research

Introduction

The pervasive and consistent evolving nature of Information and Communication Technology in education nowadays provides an indication of how the education is valued and its need for constant reform by contemporary researchers in instructional technology. Technology sharply changes our live, especially in the field of education. Through the development of social network technology such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter etc any kind of information can quickly be passed to many groups of people (Arslan, Savaser, Hallett & Balci, 2012). This necessitates the use of such technologies in education in order to expand the process of teaching and learning beyond the boundary of classroom and to provide opportunity for students and teachers to communicate with one other regardless of their distance and locations. WhatsApp is seen as one of the recent technological applications that attract the attention of educators and researchers in the field of instructional technology.

The application is available in almost every smart phone. Ibrahim, Idris and Hafiz (2015) expressed that WhatsApp as an instant message application has been used for sharing information, images, files, audio, videos, conducting real time conversation and for live video call. The application has been in the market since 2010; with aim of replacing the SMS platform of instant messages (Etim, Udosen & Ema, 2012), and to help students to fully participate in learning process as declared by the developer of the application (Ibrahim et al., 2015). Sam (2016) argued that WhatsApp is used in teaching and learning process to serve four main purposes: communicating with students; nurturing the social atmosphere; creating dialogue and encouraging sharing among students; and as a learning platform. Due to the affordability and less less-complex nature of WhatsApp, it is widely accepted and used for teaching and learning at different ladder of educational system (ranging from basic education up to higher education). Despite the fact that is perceived as an application that negatively effect on students writing skills (Bansal & Joshi, 2014), distracts students’ attention in the class (Munkaila, 2015) and wasting students’ time(Goodman, 2014), however. It is found to be effective tool for enhancing students’ academic performance (Yin, 2016), motivation (Newaz & Karim, 2016), learning engagement (Ibrahim, et al. 2015), as well as other benefits related to schools themselves .

Problem Statement

It might be palpably clear to some readers that, there are a lot of researches conducted on the use of WhatsApp in teaching learning in particular and in education in general. This naturally brings to an issue; while the results of some studies go parallel with one other, others simply contradict with each other. Content analysis is seen as a method that helps researchers to evaluate and analyze different studies (Mavi & Uzunboylu, 2014). Thus, this study is aims to review different studies on the use of WhatsApp in teaching and learning. In the field of instructional technology, many content analysis were conducted to examine and evaluate research trend of a specified instructional tools such as Interactive Smart board (Mata, Liliana, 2016; Vita, Verschaffel & Elen, 2014), flipped classroom (Zainuddin, & Halili, 2016; Aydın & Demirer, 2016), distance education (Bozkurt et al., 2015), and online learning (Ozyurt & Ozyurt, 2012). However, based on the available literature to the researcher a number of content analysis on the use of WhatsApp in education is quite limited or even not available. Thus, this study performs content analysis to the researches of WhatsApp in education in general and teaching and learning particular which are reached through open source online publications. Since there is limited content analysis research on the above mentioned area, it is though that such a study bridge a gap in the literature.

Research Questions

This study looks to answer the following research questions:

• How are the articles within the context of the study distributed by years?

• How are the articles according to specific subjects within the context of the study distributed?

• What are the most employed research method and design in the articles within the context of the study?

• Which data collection instruments are mainly used in the articles within the context of the study?

• What are the most common sampling type and sampling size used in the articles within the context of the study?

• How are the data analysis techniques in the articles within the context of the study?

• How are the articles according to the number of their authors within the context of the study distributed?

Purpose of the Study

Based on the problem statement mentioned above, this study aims to identify the trends of researches on the use of WhatsApp in education which were published between the years 2013 and 2017 and to guide researchers who are forecasting to conduct their research in the specified area to identify key areas needed for further investigation in the area

Research Methods

Findings

The findings are presented in sequence based on the research questions of the study.

Conclusion

The present study aims to identify the tendencies of researches conducted in the recent years between the years of 2013 and 2017 on WhatsApp use in education. This is to give a clear guide for the researchers on the research trends on the use of WhatsApp in education. Since the researches in the specified area were selected based on the publication year; it quite pertinent to mention that there is remarkable increase in the number of publication in 2016. This indicates that research trends in the use WhatsApp for educational purposes like teaching and learning is sharply increasing. Further findings show that WhatsApp is used to facilitate students learning, especially learning languages like English, Arabic and Chinese which are among major communicating languages in the world nowadays.

It is apparently clear in this study that; quantitative research method is intensively used by many researchers. This designates that qualitative research method and mixed method (quantitative and qualitative) are not widely used in the contemporary studies, though the latter method (mixed method research) was developed to compliment the limitations of both quantitative and qualitative research method (Creswell, 2012). This expresses the need for more researches (on WhatsApp use in education) by employing mixed method research design. This will be helpful for getting more reliable and valid results.

Based on the articles examined, true experimental and quasi-experimental quantitative research designs are most employed research design in the studies. This might be due to the fact that using WhatsApp for teaching and learning purpose is relatively new. Thus, the designs are mostly employed by educators and researchers to explore the effect of WhatsApp on enhancing students’ learning such motivation, achievement, engagement and so forth. The findings also show that, questionnaire and test scores are the most frequents instruments used for data collection in the context of this study. This is due to the reason that questionnaire is the easiest form of data collection use for large sample size on one hand, and many studies conducted within the context of this study explore the use of WhatsApp by students and teachers using questionnaire on the other hand which is descriptive in nature. Additionally, with regard to the number of instruments that are employed for data collection in the reviewed researches. It is found that studies with one instrument of data collection (58%) are more in number. This might be related to with the high number of quantitative studies. Thus, it is suggested to use more than one instrument in the researches related to use of WhatsApp in education for more reliable and valid results.

It is also found from the articles examined, students in the higher learning instituted especially undergraduate students, and diploma students are the most preferred sample groups in the studies. It might be expected that, the reason why those groups are chosen more than the others like secondary and primary schools students is the fact that; students in the higher learning institutes have more affordability to buy Smart phones and have higher probability of getting access to internet. Thus, it is recommended to conducted more researches on the use of WhatsApp in education targeting secondary and primary schools students as the sample group, because such group of students also get access to WhatsApp. It is also recommended to explore teachers’ and lecturers’ use of WhatsApp in education.

The analysis of the articles based on the number of author (s) revealed that more than two third of the researches were conducted by one or two authors. This indicates that many studies related to the specified area were not collaboratively done. This might decrease the reliability and validity of the findings.

Acknowledgments

I really appreciate the guidance I received from my Supervisor Associate Prof. Dr. Sharifah Sariah Bt Sayyed Hassan

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