Weaker students spend more hours surfing the Internet Educators have found a close relation between the number of hours students spend to surf on the Internet and their learning capability.   “Excellent and good students spend 17.6 hours to surf on Internet every week, while the figure is much higher – 31.9 hours – for weak students,” according to Tran Minh Tri, MA, from the HCM City Agriculture and Forestry University. Tri announced the finding of his survey at a workshop held some days ago, where all participants discussed the challenges brought by the Internet to students in modern times. Tri and his colleagues conducted a survey on 989 students of the school and got answers through Google Drive. “99 percent of students believe that Internet is very necessary for students in modern times. 75 percent of students access the Internet every day. Male students spend more hours on the Internet than female students,” Tri said. While believing that the Internet brings many useful things, the students admitted that Internet has had negative impacts on their lives. “62.5 percent of students said they don’t have time to do the other things because they spend hours on Internet. Others have attributed the decreased grades and bad relations with friends to the Internet,” Tri said. The most important conclusion made by Tri after the survey is the big impacts of Internet on students’grades. “The survey has found that the more students access the Internet, the worse learning results they have,” he said. Very few good and excellent students spend more than 4 hours on Internet (only 9.1 percent). Meanwhile, more than 50 percent of weak students do this. Meanwhile, Master of Psychology Nguyen Thi Phuong has pointed out the Internet has had its negative impacts not only on university students, but on general school students as well, including primary school students. A Phuong’s survey on 85 students of a secondary school in Hanoi found that 94.1 percent of them accessed the Internet to play games, chat with friends, listen to music, and watch films. Seeking information that serves their study ranks at the bottom is the list of the purposes that prompt them to access the Internet. When Phuong asked the students to draw themselves in their lovely world, a lot of students showed the pictures developed on the ideas from social networks or the pictures reflecting the “great wars” of games’ portraits. Huynh Thi Kim Tuyen from Ben Tre province agreed, saying that Internet addicts tend to be younger, and that even primary school and kindergarten students can also be the Internet addicts. “A lot of primary school students in Ben Tre play the game of getting married on Internet,” she noted, though she noted that the reasonable Internet use helps a lot of students become more dynamic and nimble. According to Associate Professor Dr Nguyen Van Tho, former Director of the Central Mental Hospital No. 2, the concept “Internet addiction” was initiated by the US Doctor Kimberly Young in 1996. The US expert defines Internet addicts as the ones who spend 38 hours a week or more on Internet for the purposes not relating to their work or learning. Thanh Mai, VietNamNet Bridge