What Students Find Appropriate By Berhane Teclehaimanot and Torey Hickman

You have got to be kidding me. I know very little of the specifics of research publications but I am shocked that anyone thought this was worth the paper I assume it was printed on. The first thing that hit me was that they give exact statistics for Forte and Hewitt 66%-33% in favor, but Mazer is "roughly even"? I doubt Mazer's scientific findings were published as "roughly even". So why leave it out? The only reason I can think of is that these authors are bias and thus left out the exact numbers because they didn't like the results. As I read further I got the feeling that these authors were huge fans of teacher student interaction on Facebook. The next bit that made my brain stop was their method. "Students were not required to have Face- book accounts to participate, but they were in- structed to participate only if they were familiar with Facebook.". Ill admit that Im new to Likert type, Rasch analysis, T tests, and Alpha levels, but are you kidding me? Your going to do a study on interaction on Facebook but not require the participants to have ever even used Facebook. Im going to do a study on wether or not space shuttles should have thermodynamic instrument panels but Im just going to ask people who live in Cape Canaveral  Florida because their "familiar" space shuttles, and oh if they happen to be an astronaut all the better. I almost stopped reading this article after that but its an assignment so I trudged along. Then I saw that they started running into all kinds of problems with their question set up and started removing participants because their answers didn't "fit". I understand that statistical anomalies occur and outliers can be removed for good reasons, but they cut 8 people. Out of 60 down to 52 If I remember correctly, thats almost 15% of your data that didn't fit? How much data are you allowed to cut to manipulate your data so that it says what you want before your study is useless. Needless to say I was not a fan.