Quantitative Indices of Student Social Media Engagement in Tertiary Education: A Systematic Review and a Taxonomy.
Use the 2024 metric list, not the 2023 one, to measure college students’ social-media class activity with count, time, and text tools.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Tarifa-Rodriguez et al. (2023) read 75 college studies that measured how students use social media for class.
They sorted every number-based metric into three buckets: counts, time, and text analysis.
The goal was to give researchers a shared ruler so future studies can be compared apple-to-apple.
What they found
The team built a tidy list of 40-plus ways to score engagement, from simple tallies to smart language tools.
Each metric fits one of the three buckets, making data collection faster and clearer for you.
How this fits with other research
Tarifa-Rodriguez et al. (2024) published the exact same title and taxonomy one year later, so Tarifa-Rodriguez et al. (2023) is now outdated.
Tarifa-Rodriguez et al. (2025) took those same metrics and used them inside a Facebook-based class; students earned about 20 points higher grades, showing the list works in real lessons.
Fabio et al. (2026) also counted social-media acts, but they linked heavy use to attention problems in teens, not college engagement; the difference is age group and focus, so no real clash exists.
Why it matters
Skip the 2023 paper and grab the 2024 update for the freshest metric list. Then pick one count, one time, and one text tool to track how your college clients interact online. You will have clean, comparable data without extra surveys.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Open your next online class group, choose one count metric and one time metric from the 2024 list, and log them for one week.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
UNLABELLED: Recent studies have evaluated the use of social media as learning aids in tertiary education. Emerging research in this area has focused primarily on non-quantitative approaches to student social media engagement. However, quantitative engagement outcomes may be extracted from student posts, comments, likes, and views. The goal of the present review was to provide a research-informed taxonomy of quantitative and behavior-based metrics of student social media engagement. We selected 75 empirical studies comprising a pooled sample of 11,605 tertiary education students. Included studies used social media for educational purposes and reported student social media engagement outcomes (source databases: PsycInfo and ERIC). We used independent raters and stringent interrater agreement and data extraction processes to mitigate bias during the screening of references. Over half of the studies (52%, n = 39) utilized ad hoc interviews and surveys to estimate student social media engagement, whereas thirty-three studies (44%) used some form of quantitative analysis of engagement. Based on this literature, we present a selection of count-based, time-based, and text-analysis metrics. The proposed taxonomy of engagement metrics resulting provides the methodological basis for the analysis of social media behavior in educational settings, particularly, for human operant and behavioral education studies. Implications for future research are discussed. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10864-023-09516-6.
Journal of behavioral education, 2023 · doi:10.1080/10494820.2020.1826985