TO national study Published this month by researchers at Stanford, Duke, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan, they analyzed more than 40,000 schools across the country using data from Yondr, a company that makes magnetic-closure cases for student cell phones.
Researchers found that cell phone activity in schools decreased dramatically after schools adopted the bags. Cell phone “pings” from campus decreased by 30 percent, and teachers reported much less non-academic phone use in class.
But the study found “close to zero” effects on test scores, attendance and online bullying, even three years after schools adopted the bags. Researchers compared Yondr schools to schools that had similar demographics and academic performance.
At first glance, those findings seemed to conflict with a study of schools in florida published last year, which found small academic gains a year after state restrictions on cellphones went into effect in 2023.
The researchers behind that study, from the University of Rochester and RAND, compared schools where student cell phone use had been historically high with schools where phone use had already been relatively low before state restrictions began. Their logic was that schools with higher cell phone use before the ban should experience a greater effect from the policy change.
Yondr’s national study, by contrast, largely compared schools that use a particularly strict form of law enforcement with schools that often already had looser restrictions on cell phones. Some schools in the comparison group still required students to keep phones hidden in backpacks or out of sight during class.
In other words, the national study largely compared stronger restrictions with weaker ones, while the Florida study compared schools with high versus low cell phone use before the ban.
Even with different methodologies and research questions, the researchers of both American studies emphasized in interviews how similar their results really were. The Florida study estimated that the academic gains, which materialized in the second year after the ban, were less than one percentile point, the equivalent of moving a student from the 50th percentile, right in the middle, to the 51st percentile. In practical terms, the difference between a small gain and almost no effects may not matter.
Both studies also documented an initial increase in disciplinary incidents before behavior stabilized, and both found signs of nonacademic benefits, including improvements in school climate or student well-being.
However, broader international research remains genuinely contradictory.
He first quantitative study A study on cell phone bans, published in England in 2016, found that cell phone restrictions improved test scores primarily for low-performing students. but a swedish studio in 2020 it found no academic or behavioral benefits.
The Swedish researchers speculated that their results could reflect the country’s long history of integrating computers into classrooms. In the 1970s, Sweden was one of the first European countries to adopt school technology, so students were already heavily reliant on laptops and other digital devices during lessons before the ubiquity of cell phones. a separate Swedish case study He also found that students often used phones between assignments rather than during instructional time.
Since then, studies in Spain, Norway, Brazil and India All have found academic benefits to mobile phone restrictions, although the benefits varied widely. The randomized trial conducted in India produced some of the greatest academic advances in the literature. The researchers randomly assigned college students by field of study to put their phones away in wooden cubbies before class, while others put them away. Unlike many American universities, there weren’t many laptops or tablets in these Indian classrooms. In fact, eliminating phones may have eliminated all digital distractions from the classroom.
One possible explanation for the disappointing U.S. results is that students are still surrounded by digital distractions even when the phones are gone. David Figlio, lead author of the Florida study, said students often switch to texting, playing games or using social media on laptops and tablets that are still allowed at school.
Another possibility is that the academic harms of modern technology are not caused primarily by classroom distraction itself. Smartphones can influence sleep, study habits, sustained attention, and resistance to reading outside of school hours in such a way that the ban on a seven-hour school day cannot be easily reversed.
“Cellphones could still have a big effect on declining student achievement, even if cellphone bans aren’t changing this much,” Figlio said. “Students could be taking shortcuts in their studies or staying up too late and getting less sleep.”
Tom Dee, a Stanford education researcher who led the national study, said the “sobering” findings in this country should not deter schools from continuing to experiment with cell phone policies.
“We should just continue to iterate, which is something we do very infrequently in education policy,” Dee said. “Let’s not move on to the next fad or the next flavor of the day. This issue is too important for us not to continue the struggle to try to figure out how to responsibly manage our children’s use of digital devices.”
