Beyond the Screen: How Peer-to-Peer and Lecturer Interactions Drive Collaborative Engagement and Academic Success
Abstract
Adoption of social media has drastically changed the landscape of higher education and the learning ecosystem of students, but there is a paradox between the positive pedagogical impact of social media and the risk of distraction in students' learning. The aim of this study is to examine the structural pathways between student-peer and student-lecturer interactions on social networking sites and active collaborative engagement and self-reported learning success. A quantitative cross-sectional research design with convenience sampling was used where 360 undergraduate and postgraduate university students were sampled. A structured 12-item questionnaire with a 5-point Likert scale was given, and structural equation modeling was carried out with the Python coding to analyze the structural pathways. Results of the empirical study indicate that the factors of peer-to-peer interaction and student-to-lecturer interaction have a highly significant positive influence on collaborative learning engagement, where the value of student-to-lecturer interaction is stronger. Collaborative engagement, in turn, has a highly significant positive relationship with students' perceived academic performance impact. Importantly, pathway analysis confirms the dual mechanism of action: peer socialization has a direct effect on study outcomes, and an indirect effect is that peer interaction also facilitates a cooperative environment, which in turn leads to better outcomes. The study ends with the following conclusion: "Social networking applications can be considered as sustainable pedagogical assets if they are structured as intentional learning environments rather than distractions. These findings provide a framework that is theoretically integrated by the link between constructivist learning and technology acceptance. In practice, this means that university management and educational designers are urged to incorporate desired digital platforms into the structure of the institution and increase the readiness of staff for asynchronous learning and teaching. Future studies should move towards longitudinal designs and objective measures like cumulative grade point average and explore the various and cross-disciplinary student populations to assess the generalizability of such digital learning dynamics.
Keywords: Collaborative engagement, Academic performance, Social constructivism, Student interactivity
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21953386
