Poor self-regulation, rather than social media, may be to blame for low grades, according to a new study conducted by Reynol Junco, associate professor of education.

Junco’s study surveyed 1600 college students of varying class ranks to estimate how much time they spend on Facebook, what they do on the site and how often they are multitasking.

He also took note of each student’s GPA.

For sophomores, juniors and seniors, using Facebook didn’t seem to have any negative effects on their grades, but for freshman students, time spent on Facebook had a significant negative impact on their GPAs.

However, sites like Facebook are necessary for freshmen, Junco said, because they help ease the transition from high school to college. They help students build and maintain new friendships. Without social media, students might feel disconnected from their peers and are in danger of dropping out.

“It’s a double-edged sword for freshmen,” Junco said. “They almost need to be on Facebook, but they seem to have trouble regulating their Facebook use.”

Self-regulation is the real issue behind low GPAs, Junco said. He says the study is much more broad than the effects of social media.

“Some might hear that this [study] is about Facebook, and to me, it’s not,” Junco said. “It’s about Facebook being a window into self-regulation skills.”

Freshmen, he said, have difficulty managing their free time once they get to college and they don’t yet have the discipline to schedule study time.

“I don’t think this is something for freshman to take on themselves. It’s more of a society issue,” Junco said. “We should be teaching self-regulation skills as early as middle school.”

For Javier Montalvo, sophomore in construction engineering, his first few weeks at Iowa State were difficult, but not because of social media.

“[Facebook] doesn’t take up much of my time,” Montalvo said. “It doesn’t affect my studying hours or school hours, but it was hard at the beginning because you don’t know much about [self-regulation] until college.”

Montalvo would have appreciated more practice with time management in high school, such as “giving you responsibility to check for your own assignments and [doing more things] on your own.” He said, “teachers aren’t all over you like in high school.”

Blake Burns, senior in computer engineering, thinks that developing time management skills is different for everyone.

“I feel like it’s just a personal thing,” he said. “Especially freshman year, you feel very unguided. At the end of freshman year, I felt like I wasted a lot of my time.”

But maybe that’s sort of a rite of passage, Burns said.

“Most people get there personally,” he said. “They can’t understand they’re bad at [time management] until they do it.”

Burns said he has gotten much better at time management in his years at Iowa State. Freshmen just have to figure out how to use their time wisely.

“We know that self-regulation is malleable. You can teach it and change it,” Junco said. “We need to start looking at that at younger ages, so that when freshmen get onto campus, they can say, ‘Okay, now I need to focus on this,’ while understanding that it’s important to have a social life as well.”

Junco plans to conduct his next study on this issue and is currently collecting data on self-regulation intervention for younger students.