The Study of Internet Use and Academic Achievement of Elementary Students in Bangkok

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between internet usage behavior and academic achievement among elementary school students from grade 4-6 in Bangkok. The researcher employed Multi-stage Sampling to recruit 297 samples. The data was gathered via the following tests- 1) Intelligence tests, namely Colored Progressive Matrices (CPM) for students aged 5-11 year old or Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) for 12 year old and above, and 2) Academic achievement test, namely Wide Range Achievement Test Thai Edition- WRAT-Thai. The findings revealed that time spent on the internet is negatively correlated to student’s reading achievement (r = -.24, p < .001), spelling achievement (r = -.26, p < .001), and math achievement (r = -.20, p = .001). More surprisingly, academic related internet usage was also found to be negatively correlated to math achievement (r = -.20, p < 0.05). Meanwhile, internet usage for social media has a correlation with academic achievement in math and reading, (r = -.20, p = .001) and (r = -.13, p < .05), respectively. Moreover, internet usage for entertainment was found to have a negative correlation with academic achievement in reading, spelling and math, (r = -.25, p < .001), (r = -.27, p < .001) and (r = -.21, p < .001), respectively. Internet usage for online business, however, yielded no correlation to academic achievement. The study concluded that daily internet usage does have an effect on academic achievement in math. Moreover, when used for entertainment and social media, internet usage can pose a negative effect on academic achievement in reading and writing.