Advice to fellow students!

New research by Professor Paul Kirschner from a Dutch university has apparently discovered that being logged on to Facebook will affect your test results in a negative way. That is, there is a 0.76 grade difference between the averages of those who don't use social-networking and those who do.

Now, what came first:

Professor Kirschner assumes that poor test results are a result of social networking. But as far as I can tell from the conduct of his research, and you can read the same article I did here, there is nothing that suggests it could not be the other way around. Could it not be that less-disciplined, less-motivated or even less-skilled students are more inclined to hang out online while studying than the disciplined, intelligent and dutiful ones? Maybe they scored lower because they don't work as hard or understand the subject as easily?

I don't really doubt Kirschner's conclusion, but I am exasperated by how he has arrived at it. My fellow students, beware of the biased researcher who declare his opinions fact in the name of science.