Augmenting student engagement through the use of social media: the role of knowledge sharing behaviour and knowledge sharing self-efficacy

Student disengagement and dropout have been a concern among higher education institutions that adopt a mass lecture mode of knowledge delivery. Lack of student-student and student-teacher interactions is the primary reason causing student engagement to suffer. Recently, the widespread use of social networking sites such as Facebook has prompted researchers and educators to explore the use of this online platform to promote student engagement. Drawing on the development-in-sociocultural context perspective of student engagement, the current study contributes to this line of research by examining the indirect effect of perceived pedagogical affordance of Facebook on students' cognitive engagement with knowledge sharing behaviour as a mediator and knowledge sharing self-efficacy as a moderator. Results of the moderated mediation analysis of the Rasch-calibrated self-report data from 399 higher education students revealed that the indirect effect of perceived pedagogical affordance of Facebook on cognitive engagement through knowledge sharing behaviour was significant among students who had moderate to strong confidence in knowledge sharing, but not significant among those with low confidence. The study findings inform educators of appropriate instructional approaches to leveraging students' self-efficacy in knowledge sharing and fostering a knowledge sharing culture that has potential to enhance students' cognitive engagement in higher education.