How a Crucial Distinction Continues to be Blurred in the Debate Around Phones in Schools

NOTE: I am currently on holiday, so this will be short and sweet.

One year ago, a paper was published arguing that school phone policies do not improve student learning.

This finding was not particularly surprising, as most school ‘phone policies’ are not genuine bans. Most policies prohibit students from using phones during class-time, but allow device access between classes, during breaks, at lunch, or while traveling to and from school.

Unfortunately, the negative impact of digital technology on learning does not begin and end in the classroom. Rather, the biological and cognitive mechanisms linked to disrupted learning - including craving, fragmented consolidation, and energetic depletion - continue throughout the day (explored in depth in this video here).

Long story short: if you want to test the effect of a true phone ban on learning, phones likely need to be genuinely removed from the school environment bell-to-bell.

Importantly, the researchers in this paper never claimed to study ‘bans.’ They were careful to state they examined phone ‘policies.’

Needless to say, though, the popular press was quick to confuse these two and begin talking about the irrelevance of bans in the classroom.

NEW RESEARCH

Last month, a new working paper from researchers at Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania (amongst others) was released.

This paper again reports no improvement in learning outcomes from phone policies - but this time the paper itself uses the term ‘School Phone Bans.’

The problem is that the intervention examined was not actually a ban in any meaningful sense. The researchers studied Yondr pouches (lockable sleeves students keep on their person and place their phones into during parts of the school day).

Unfortunately, a phone stored in a pouch a student continues carrying is not equivalent to a phone removed from campus.

So what did the researchers actually find?

First, this is still a working paper - it has not yet been peer reviewed. As such, all conclusions should be interpreted cautiously.

Second, the study did not directly measure total phone use; rather, it inferred phone activity from location-based behavioral data during school hours.

The reported reduction in phone activity was surprisingly small. In fact, the paper states that Yondr pouch adoption reduced net phone visits by ‘approximately 0.19 [natural] log points across the pooled sample.’

Translated into English, that corresponds to roughly a 17% reduction in measured phone activity.

If we extrapolated this into everyday behaviour, that would be consistent with:

• Students who checked their phones 100 times during the school day now checking them roughly 83 times.
• Students who spent 6 hours on their phones now spending closer to 5.
• Students who previously ignored 10 peer interactions in order to scroll social media now ignoring 8.

That’s nowhere near a bell-to-bell ban.

SO NOW THEN…

A year ago, the press blurred the distinction between a ‘policy’ and a ‘ban.’ Today, researchers themselves appear to have blurred that distinction as well.

This paper does not show that genuine bans fail to improve learning outcomes. In fact, it does not even examine bans in any meaningful sense.

What it appears to show is that Yondr pouches produce a partial reduction in observable phone activity during the school day.

That’s it.

Drawing stronger conclusions than that would be incredibly difficult to justify.

NOTE: The paper does report one additional finding worth mentioning: teachers reported that the share of students visibly using phones during class for personal reasons fell substantially following Yondr adoption. Although important, suppressed overt classroom use is not equivalent to eliminating broader device presence, craving, anticipation, or cognitive fragmentation across the entire school day (which are the mechanisms advocates of genuine bell-to-bell bans are primarily concerned with).