To move student scores up, put the phones down

When the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) test results were released this fall, scores for reading — and especially for literary reading — were down regardless of whether the students were wealthy or poor, in private or public schools, in rural or urban areas. In general, standardized tests measure nothing more accurately than socioeconomic status: students from families with money outperform students of poverty. That gap persists in this year’s NAEP reading scores as well, but the fact that scores fell across the board points to something unusual going on.

The likely culprit turns out to be close at hand. Literally. As cell phone and other screen time use has increased, student academic performance has dropped, according to research such as a recent meta-analysis published in JAMA Pediatrics. Hidden in the background information collected from the fourth grade and eighth grade students taking NAEP is that same smoking gun. All students reported some screen time daily, and those with the most had the lowest reading scores. In fact, Common Sense Media found that 8 to 12-year-olds spend an astonishing five hours a day outside of schoolwork on screens.

Anecdotally, I can say that my high school teacher colleagues and I are seeing the effects in our classrooms. Sure, screens can be useful in education. But they are also a major distraction for students who wrongly believe they can multitask, and they offer opportunities to cyberbully others or to cheat on tests

We don’t yet know how access to a handheld super-computer/entertainment device/dopamine delivery system is changing the way our brains work. Or more importantly, how young users might be conditioned by frequent cell phone use to have difficulty with attention, vocabulary, and persistence, all observable conditions starting to be researched and quantified.

The problem isn’t just an American one. Schools in France, Canada, and Australia have instituted cell phone bans in schools. Teacher blogs are full of suggestions for ways to “park” or lock cell phones out of student reach. After several years of trying to incorporate cell phone use in my lessons, this year I threw in the towel and made a “no phones during instructional time” policy. Even my best students strayed away from any justifiable educational use, and I got tired of policing students who were texting or playing games. No matter how interesting my lessons might be, they can’t compete with the newest version of Mario Kart or a SnapChat buzz.

Education professor Patricia Alexander at the University of Maryland summed it up this way: “Children have become much more immersed in their technologies than we ever thought they would be. Schools have spent millions and millions of dollars installing and updating and maintaining technologies because they believe they are critical for students to do well and learn. The problem is that what we’re finding now is that all of this digital is actually changing the minds of students, the habits of students in a very broad way that is not necessarily facilitative of deep learning.”

I do have some hope. A growing number of my students are admitting that their cell phone use is a problem. Recently I overheard a student explaining to another how to set Screen Time on his phone to lock himself out of certain apps and limit his use.

“I’m able to get to sleep now,” he said as a selling point. “And I started getting my homework done.”