In Maryland, a chemistry teacher says students use gambling apps to place bets during the school day.

In California, a high school teacher complains that students watch Netflix on their phones during class. In Maryland, a chemistry teacher says students use gambling apps to place bets during the school day.

Around the country, educators say students routinely send Snapchat messages in class, listen to music and shop online, among countless other examples of how smartphones distract from teaching and learning.

The hold that phones have on adolescents in America today is well-documented, but teachers say parents are often not aware to what extent students use them inside the classroom. And increasingly, educators and experts are speaking with one voice on the question of how to handle it: Ban phones during classes.

  • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
    1·
    8 months ago

    Sure thing, here’s some random studies.

    https://www.edweek.org/leadership/digital-distractions-in-class-linked-to-lower-academic-performance/2023/12

    About two-thirds of U.S. students reported that they get distracted by using digital devices, and about 54 percent said they get distracted by other students who are using those resources, the PISA results found.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5648953/

    The main findings of the study were that 67% of students were distracted by use of cell phones and 21% of them were extremely disturbed and it affected their learning.

    https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1350.pdf

    We find that following a ban on phone use, student test scores improve by 6.41% of a standard deviation. Our results indicate that there are no significant gains in student performance if a ban is not widely complied with. Furthermore, this effect is driven by the most disadvantaged and underachieving pupils. Students in the lowest quartile of prior achievement gain 14.23% of a standard deviation, whilst, students in the top quartile are neither positively nor negatively affected by a phone ban. The results suggest that low-achieving students are more likely to be distracted by the presence of mobile phones, while high achievers can focus in the classroom regardless of the mobile phone policy. This also implies that any negative externalities from phone use do not impact on the high achieving students. Schools could significantly reduce the education achievement gap by prohibiting mobile phone use in schools.

    Students themselves report phones being significantly distracting, including to other people that aren’t using them, and there’s even evidence that banning phones directly increases student performance, especially amongst low-performing students.

    How does this compare against the benefits of exposing teacher bigotry? I won’t pretend to know how to quantify that, but I’m not making the positive claim that banning phones is necessarily worth the loss of ability to expose teachers. My only point is that it is plausible that this is the case, and I think I’ve supplied decent evidence for that. Policy questions very rarely are between “good option” and “bad option”, but rather “bad option” vs “worse option”.