The academic and social importance of SNSs for undergraduate students was pointed out in literature. Michikyan et al., argued that college students need to develop new networks of support; especially for those with new academic experiences such as: first-year students, first generation college students, and immigrant students [3] . These students may use online network sites such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to develop the support network they need [15] . Furthermore, social media helps in establishing peer-support networks prior to first-year students arriving to campus.

As for first generation students, whom parents have not attended university or undergraduate school, social media is very important because it offers emotional support and confidence from Facebook friends [14] . First generation lack parental emotional support given that their parents have not experienced successfully graduating from college and are less involved in society and with teachers [16] . The students’ confidence of college application process, for instance, was associated with instrumental support from Facebook friends and information obtained from social media [14] . Accordingly, SNSs are used frequently by more students to build new friendship networks in order to be successful in both social and academic domains [17] . SNSs also help in facilitating the art of learning by providing a media to share ideas which allow students to collaborate with others through building their own virtual communities [1] . [14] stated that Facebook as the most popular example of SNSs plays a crucial role in predicting expectations of college success; i.e. having successful Facebook colleagues in college serve a positive example of people from similar backgrounds.

Although SNSs is a very helpful tool in students’ hands, it was found by many studies that a negative impact of social network sites usage on academic performance could occur [1] [5] [6] . Many students claimed that SNSs usage did not affect their marks, while others admit that SNSs permanent usage can be a distraction, time consuming, and lead to academic procrastination [1] [18] . In [5] research, results pointed to a negative impact of online social media usage on academic performance; therefore, as time spent on social networking sites increases, the academic performance of the students is seen to deteriorate. Nevertheless; (Junco, 2015) studied the impact of college students’ academic level and found that Facebook affected Grade Point Averages (GPAs) negatively for freshmen, sophomores, juniors but not for seniors. Seniors spend less time on Facebook, and they are less likely to post status updates comments, chats, posts, videos or photos than others [10] .

On the other hand; as SNSs can be accessed from digital device such as a personal computer, a smart phone, a tablet or a laptop; some studies focused on the impact of using such digital devices on students’ academic performance since those devices are the main reason for the excessive usage of SNSs. [6] , for instance, said that there is a strong negative correlation between the amount of time spent on the computer and the time spent on study; and again they found that people who spend more time on computers spend less time on studying and get less GPAs. [19] explored that Cell Phone use was negatively related to GPA and positively related to anxiety. They found that high frequency cell phone users tended to have lower GPA, higher anxiety, and lower satisfaction with life relative to their peers who used the cell phone less often.

Although many researchers say that there is a negative impact between Facebook usage and academic performance, some researchers found that the increase in use of social networks did not necessarily decrease the academic performance of the students [1] . They found that most students did not use social media excessively, however there were some exceptions. In fact, the process of managing time between study and social network usage, known also as multitasking, can mitigate the risk of lower GPAs due to Facebook use. Consequently, in order to be successful, students should learn how to balance academic and social demands. In [5] , authors even suggested that instructors could use mandatory policies disallowing students to use their phones and computers unless required for course purposes.

Many students think that time management is the factor that contributed towards negative academic performance besides excessive social media use [1] . However, some researchers found that although students feel competent in their ability to use social networks sites for academic purposes, they did not have the desire or willingness to do so [5] . As mentioned before, [10] pointed out that seniors use Facebook less than freshmen and they are better in multitasking, since they have understood what they need to do in order to be successful. Researchers suggested that first year students must learn how to balance academic and social demands effectively in order to be successful. It is important that these new students should do such balancing through building social connections. Generally speaking, students with more self-regulations were more able to control Facebook use [11] .

This study used variables that are common in social network literature. By reviewing the literature, it was noticed that there is a need to examine if the use of social networks websites among universities students could impact their academic achievements directly or moderated by other variable. Figure 1 displays the research’s proposed model.

[21] defines social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to construct a public or semi- public profile within a bounded system, articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. Indeed, the use of social networks websites may be defined as the degree on which users spend time using social network websites and academic as facts. However, we can define academic achievement as student’s performance and to which extent he/she obtained the education objectives, goals and outcomes.

In order to test the causal model of the relationship between the uses of social networks websites and academic achievements; the study is hypothesized as follows:

Data should be collected from the people that can provide the correct answers to solve the problem [22] and represent the whole people, events or objects the researcher want to study. Therefore, the population of this study consists of bachelor students who studied Social Media Network course as elective course from the University of Jordan located in Jordan, which counts of more than 30,000 students according to the university’s registration unit. Indeed, the researchers have chosen bachelor students from all faculties as they are the largest category studying at the University of Jordan. Also, the current research data was conducted by using drop and collect surveys which covers large samples of the population. This technique is less expensive and consumes less time than other methods such as interviews; and covers a wider geographical area. As a result, the researchers used this method of data collection at the University of Jordan. Indeed, by using a drop and collect method to thousands of students, 366 survey questionnaires were returned, which is adequate for statistical analysis, based on [23] [24] .

According to [25] it is important to make sure that the instrument developed to measure a particular concept is accurately measuring the variable and is actually measuring the concept that it is supposed to measure in the research. Indeed, reliability analysis is related to the assessment of the degree of consistency between multiple measurements of a variable, whereas validity analysis refers to the degree to which a scale or set of measures accurately represents the construct [26] . The reliability of the instrument was measured by the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient. Further, some scholars e.g. [27] suggested that the values of all indicators or dimensional scales should be above the recommended value of 0.60. However, the Cronbach’s alpha for the independent variable (i.e. use of social networks websites) was 0.87; while the dependent variable, academic achievements, has a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of 0.86.

Convergent validity refers to the degree to which items or measures are correlated with each other to measure the same construct. Therefore, higher correlation shows that the scale is assessing its aimed construct. The closer the values are to 1 the more highly correlated the items are, and specifically the individual item reliability is recommended to be greater than 0.50 [27] [28] . Table 1 and Table 2 display the correlations between the independent items, and the dependent items respectively.

It has been noticed from both Table 1 and Table 2 that most of the values were close to 0.5 which indicate a positive correlation between items. This leads to a higher level of convergent validity.

As showed in Table 3, the demographic profile of the respondents for this study revealed that they are typically female, most of them in their second and third year level, about 64% of them are of ages between 20-less than 23 years old, and using Facebook heavily more over an hour daily and more than 10 hours per week.

In order to describe the responses and thus the attitude of the respondents toward each question they were asked in the survey, the mean and the standard deviation were estimated. While the mean shows the central tendency of the data, the standard deviation measures the dispersion which offers an index of the spread or variability in the data [22] [25] . In other words, a small standard deviation for a set of values reveals that these values are clustered closely about the mean or located close to it; a large standard deviation indicates the opposite. Table 4 shows the overall mean and standard deviation of the independent and dependent variables.

As presented in Table 4, data analysis results have shown that the use of social networks websites among bachelor students is applied to a great extent at the University of Jordan in which the mean score is 3.7233. This serves as an indicator on the importance of the use of social networks websites and the essential role that they play in enhancing the students’ academic achievements. Furthermore, data analysis results have revealed that academic achievements itself is applied to a great extent at the University of Jordan in which the mean score is 3.7459. This high level of presentation denotes a positive attitude regarding students’ academic achievements. This sturdily advocates that University of Jordan is currently engaging in information technology and mobile application activities with their students.

The purpose of this study was to test the impact of the use of social networks websites on academic achievements. Thus, in order to test the hypotheses developed for this study, a simple linear regression technique was used. Further, the level of significance (α-level) was chosen to be 0.05 and the probability value (p-value) obtained from the statistical hypotheses test is considered to be the decision rule for rejecting the null hypotheses [29] . If the p-value is less than or equal to α-level, the null hypothesis will be rejected and the alternative hypothesis will be supported. However, if the p-value is greater than the α-level, the null hypothesis cannot be rejected and the alternative hypothesis will not be supported.