The influence of social media platforms on student engagement and information literacy in a University setting

Social media and information literacy do not only involve accessing information and having social connections but also ascertain the dependability, trustworthiness, and pertinence of sources to discern facts, identify biases and false news, which are vital for student participation in these digital information environments when the option to enter a library is low amongst the given user to clear up misconceptions and build knowledge. It goes without saying that a descriptive research design was used for this study. The instrument used was a self-structured instrument on the influence of social media platforms on student engagement and information literacy in a university setting, a questionnaire on a 4 Likert scale format consisting of 20 items presented to produce data. Before we accepted it for use, the instrument was given to three experts in educational technology for validation purposes, and it met construct validity. A reliability index value of 0.893 was received through the Cronbach Alpha reliability method applied to ascertain the instrument's reliability. A chi-square test of independence was conducted to test the study hypotheses at a .05 level of significance. The results of the study show that there is no significant difference between the IL skills of university students who use social media for academic purposes and their counterparts who use social media for non-academic