Strict bans on mobile phones in schools have “close to zero” impact on student learning and show no evidence of improvements in attendance or online bullying, a study has found.
Researchers at US universities including Stanford and Duke looked at nearly 1,800 US schools where students’ phones were kept in locked pouches and found little or no differences in outcomes compared with similar schools without strict bans.
The report concluded that among schools instituting a ban: “For academic achievement, average effects on test scores are consistently close to zero.”
The results will come as a disappointment to teaching unions and campaigners in England who backed the government’s recent move to restrict the use of mobile phones in schools. A ban is likely to come into force next year.
Kids not having phones at school (or not having access to them or similar) does address huge problems with phones at schools.
I’m not advocating anything like ID verification and have no idea what the pouches are about.
Self regulation is great and the only true solution. But roughly no kid can self regulate under current conditions, as we see. They need an environment conducive to learning those crucial skills.
And I hate the retreat to “well the parents should do more!” which is just an unsympathetic blamey way to say “what we have is as good as it gets I guess” because if it’s largely the parents needing to do more, that’s what we have. The status quo. Not a great recommendation.
If parents doing more was a viable strategy would we need to regulate use of car seats? Would we have seatbelts at all if some flavor of “people making important but annoying decisions correctly all the time” was a good way to achieve healthy societal outcomes?
“Kids probably shouldn’t have cell phones in schools” does not seem controversial, given the evidence, the specific nature of school and kids and those devices, and the blatant obvious evidence we see everywhere we look.