Professor Rey Junco

No awards or grants added yet.

Rey Junco is a social media scholar who investigates the impact of emerging technologies on college students. His investigations concentrate on how social media affect student psychosocial development, engagement, and success. His research has focused on informing best practices in technology use with students in the areas of advising, student affairs, and teaching. Through research findings, Rey has shown that technology, especially social media like Facebook and Twitter, can be repurposed in order to improve educational outcomes. He is especially interested in examining the digital divide-- differences in the ownership and use of technology by members of underrepresented groups.

Best known for his innovative research on how students use technology, Rey conducted the first large, multi-institution survey of student technology use, which he wrote about in his book, Connecting to the Net.Generation: What Higher Education Professionals Need to Know about Today’s Students. Rey further explored students’ Internet usage in his second book, Using Emerging Technologies, in which he examined comprehensive analysis of social media’s role in student engagement, technology’s potential to improve retention, and blogs’ potential to improve students’ writing and marketing skills. He recently published results from the first experimental study of social media on academic outcomes and found that Twitter can be co-opted for academic purposes in order to increase student engagement and improve grades.

Rey earned his doctorate in education in counselor education and his master’s in clinical psychology from Penn State University. He holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from The University of Florida. Rey currently serves as a faculty member in the Department of Academic Development and Counseling and Director of Disability Services at Lock Haven University.