The widespread adoption of social networking sites among college students has motivated an increasing number of researchers to discern the relationship between social networking site use and academic performance. However, these studies mainly address the direct effect of social networking site use on academic performance, thus failing to identify and incorporate relevant explanatory mechanisms. The present study addresses this gap by examining the mediating role of student engagement in the relationship between social networking site use and academic performance. The study gathered pertinent data from a sample of college students (N = 180) by using a questionnaire, which measured social networking site use based on the number of hours students spent daily on six popular social networking sites, student engagement using a ten-item scale adapted from the literature, and academic performance using semester grade-point average. An empirical test of the mediation model using the PROCESS macro demonstrates that student engagement mediates the negative association between social networking site use and college students’ academic performance. This study contributes to the literature by documenting pioneering evidence of the mediating role of student engagement.

大学生中社交网站的广泛采用促使越来越多的研究人员认识到社交网站的使用与学习成绩之间的关系。但是，这些研究主要针对社交网站使用对学习成绩的直接影响，因此未能确定和纳入相关的解释机制。本研究通过检查学生参与在社交网站使用与学习成绩之间的关系中的中介作用来解决这一差距。该研究从大学生样本中收集了相关数据（N = 180）通过使用问卷调查，该问卷基于学生在六个流行的社交网站上每天花费的小时数，使用从文献中改编的十项量表来衡量学生的参与度以及使用学期成绩来衡量其学习成绩，点平均。使用PROCESS宏对中介模型进行的实证测试表明，学生的参与介导了社交网站使用与大学生学习成绩之间的负相关关系。这项研究通过记录有关学生参与的中介作用的开创性证据，为文献做出了贡献。