School cell phone bans and student achievement • Hacker News Board

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#131

Post by kelnos » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:56 AM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #104

sapientiae3 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main challenge is that the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for impulse control and other things, only fully develops around age 25. The problem with that is without some explicit instruction or guidance or invention before they have full control of their impulses, not everyone tames the beast unscathed.

> The main challenge is that the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for impulse control and other things, only fully develops around age 25. This factoid has been repeated for decades but it’s essentially a myth. Brain development continues into your 20s, but there isn’t a threshold at age 25 where someone goes from having poor impulse control to being capable of good impulse control. 18-25 year olds are not chi…

I don't think anyone is saying impulse control goes from 0% to 100% on everyone's 25th birthday, like flicking a switch. But is it not reasonable to say that a 25-year-old will have significantly better impulse control than they had when they were 18? (And that their 30-year-old self probably has a similar level of impulse control as when they were 25?)

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#132

Post by achikin » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 7:06 AM UTC

rossjudson wrote: post #119

achikin wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it is proven that phone usage is not an addiction like drugs or alcohol. People put phones away easily if they have a reason to do so.

I have no idea what you are talking about. It walks and quacks exactly like drugs and alcohol. Thousands of deaths every year are caused by drivers on cell phones. You'd think they'd have a reason to put them away.

There are a lot of reasons for distraction while driving, but we don’t call all of them addiction on that premise. If a driver was not looking at his phone - maybe he’d be looking at something else. The phone is not the reason - it’s just a very suitable object.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#133

Post by card_zero » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 7:09 AM UTC

BenFranklin100 wrote: post #110

est wrote: post #108

If phones were totally banned for kids, where would the kid get to know the world? TVs? Newspapers? Magazines? Well those are on-way, with limited feedbacks. What's the better alternative except phones?

For those of us who grew up before 2000, we somehow managed. I think younger people today will as well.

No we didn't. I never learned how to write games for 8-bit computers in assembler, like commercial games. No source of information would tell me about anything other than BASIC. There was no way to find out.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#134

Post by achikin » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 7:12 AM UTC

emil-lp wrote: post #122

achikin wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it is proven that phone usage is not an addiction like drugs or alcohol. People put phones away easily if they have a reason to do so.

Citation needed

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6174603/

The main idea here is that overuse not equals addiction.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#135

Post by huhkerrf » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 7:45 AM UTC

japhyr wrote: post #61

aschla wrote: post #3

I'm not particularly old yet, in my mid-thirties, but I reacted like someone much older when I learned kids are allowed to carry around their phones all day at school. Back in my day (when we walked to school uphill both ways), we weren't allowed to carry around basic flip phones. They had to be in our locker and only used before or after school. When and why did it become acceptable for much more distracting and sti…

I was a classroom teacher from 1994-2019, so I watched the transition through the advent of phones until just before Covid. It's not as simple as it seems, for a few reasons. One, there's the very real pressure from parents to be able to contact their kids when they need to. In the US, regular school shootings have made this a complicated issue to navigate. Also, it requires much more consistency from school staff th…

There have been 70 school shootings (not mass shootings) this year, including accidental discharges. Required caveat that any school gun deaths are too much, etc. etc.

But... this means that a student is significantly more likely to get injured or killed riding in car with their friends, but somehow that was allowed before phones. The school shootings excuse is not a reason to let kids have phones in schools.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#136

Post by inglor_cz » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 7:52 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #124

testing22321 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules. I would rather they come to terms with this addiction for themselves That approach doesn’t work so well for people with drug and alcohol addictions/dependancies. What makes you think this is different?

> That approach doesn’t work so well for people with drug and alcohol addictions/dependancies. Children raised in cultures where alcohol is soft- rather than hard-banned for young people, and gradually introduced to it with parents around (think European teenagers having a glass of wine with lunch), tend to have healthier relationships with alcohol in later life than those raised in hard-ban-until-18/21 cultures. I t…

There may be a massive confounding factor in the type of alcohol consumed.

The more permissive cultures tend to be beer- or wine-centric. I have never been deeply interested in addictology, but the few (older) works on alcoholism I have read mentioned that beer and wine drinkers tend to develop a different sort of relationship with alcohol than hard drink consuments, in the sense that they have a hard time abstaining entirely, but fewer of them develop into the full-blown "gin zombie" type.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#137

Post by lmm » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 7:56 AM UTC

inglor_cz wrote: post #136

lmm wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That approach doesn’t work so well for people with drug and alcohol addictions/dependancies. Children raised in cultures where alcohol is soft- rather than hard-banned for young people, and gradually introduced to it with parents around (think European teenagers having a glass of wine with lunch), tend to have healthier relationships with alcohol in later life than those raised in hard-ban-until-18/21 cultures. I t…

There may be a massive confounding factor in the type of alcohol consumed. The more permissive cultures tend to be beer- or wine-centric. I have never been deeply interested in addictology, but the few (older) works on alcoholism I have read mentioned that beer and wine drinkers tend to develop a different sort of relationship with alcohol than hard drink consuments, in the sense that they have a hard time abstaining…

I suspect that's not so much a confounder as one of the mechanisms.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#138

Post by uniqueuid » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 8:05 AM UTC

doctorpangloss wrote: post #48

uniqueuid wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok here is the crucial part of the paper: It's a difference in differences design, using individual-level test scores and de-seasonalized data (p. 13). Their wording is: > Y_igst is the outcome of interest for student i in grade g in school s in time period t, HighAct_s is an indicator for high pre-ban smartphone activity schools, D_t is a series of time period dummies (t = 0 indicates the first period after the ban…

what it means is that this paper shows probable causality and models a lot of interesting features. it is most definitely not flawed. i think the tough thing is that 0.6 percentage points gain for the average student is quite small. it's actually less than you gain by studying for 1h for the SAT, which is probably about 0.9 percentage points, depending on how you interpret college board's research (it recommends 20h…

Thanks for the context!

To me this was the most informative comment in the thread because it offers some effect size comparison.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#139

Post by kelnos » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 8:08 AM UTC

ryuhhnn wrote: post #20

jobs_throwaway wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's much more likely that simply changing the way they administer these tests had a more significant impact on test scores than phone bans. Why do you think that's more likely?

Put yourself in the student's shoes: instead of being required to rote memorise every detail and hold that in your head until the end of the year, you are now only required to be assessed at the time that you are learning the material. Do you think you'd fare better on that type of test, or a test done months after you actually studied the material? One of the first things they teach you in educational research is th…

That also depends on how the tests work. If each test covers both the new material since the previous test, as well as older material, then that would require students retain all the material, not just the recent stuff.

Or maybe the last test of the semester covers the entire semester's material, while the earlier tests only cover new material since the previous test.

We can't say for sure without this information.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#140

Post by kelnos » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 8:09 AM UTC

ecb_penguin wrote: post #105

beastman82 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, correlation does not imply causation

And of course, sometimes a correlation does in fact imply a causation!

No, correlation does not imply causation. However, sometimes you find both correlation and causation, depending on the evidence you have.