Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

School cell phone bans and student achievement

nber.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 221 posts

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#141

Post by kelnos »

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'm a little older than you (mid forties), and back in my day (when we walked to school uphill, both ways, in the snow, with no shoes), they banned pagers. (And the penalties could be pretty bad, since "only drug dealers have pagers".)

(The thing that annoyed teachers was when we played games on our graphing calculators, which they of course couldn't ban, since the school required them in the first place!)

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#142

Post by kelnos »

makeitdouble wrote: post #98
Mistletoe wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they need to contact their kids they can call the school to talk to them in the very rare case that is actually necessary. It was quite nice and refreshing to have the umbilical cut to your parents while you were at school in the past. You had to learn how to be on your own. If there is a school shooting, what is texting their kid going to do?

I feel too few people apply the same logic to themselves. For instance would you put your phone in a locker for the time you're on the clock for work ? Some professions require that, it's not an unreasonable proposition in itself. But how many actually can/would do it ? Some people see it as a guilt thing and just assume they're succumbing to some tentation. Another way to look at it is the generic message being just…

I don't think those situations are comparable. Adults in the workplace are expected to get their work done, meet deadlines, act professionally, etc. If an employee doesn't do that, there are consequences, and we judge that adults can decide for themselves if they want to bear those consequences.

We put extra rules in place for kids because their brains aren't fully developed and they very often incorrectly assess whether or not the consequences of an action are worth it.

(And yes, adults are bad at that assessment sometimes, too, but we as a society have decided that at some point we need to take off the training wheels.)

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#143

Post by kelnos »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #50
AAAAaccountAAAA wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is precisely because they are more distracting. When the most addictive thing in phones was the snake game, kids did not bother to insist in using their phones all the time. Now, when you try to tell a pupil to put the phone away, it often results in a huge arguments, so eventually teachers gave up.

no seizing of phones, no detention/disciplary action? It's not even about the phones at that point, it's just general disrespect to staff. What changed overtime? Or maybe it was always this way and I simply had a better environment?

As usual, it's the parents, as a result of decades of creeping helicopter parenting. Without district-wide policy, if a teacher were to confiscate a phone, that would lead to a parent calling the school administrator to complain. The administrators, absent a policy, are spineless, and assure the parent it won't happen again. The teacher then gets chastised by the administration.

So then the teachers just stop caring: doing something about the phone distraction will only cause them grief. If the kids don't learn, whatever, not their problem, really, as long as the same thing is happening in every other classroom, which it is.

A school-wide policy, or, even better, a district-wide policy gives the teachers and school administrators cover: they can make sympathetic noises when the parents complain, but tell the parents there's nothing they can do, because the policy comes from above their pay grade.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#144

Post by kelnos »

card_zero wrote: post #133
BenFranklin100 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure how having a smartphone in class would have allowed you to do that, though. And regardless, if you're in a physics or language class, you should be focusing on those those topics, not learning how to write computer games.

My high school did offer a computer science class in the 90s, and students who took it got to use the school's computer lab. If your school didn't have something like that, that's a shame, but that doesn't suggest that you should have been able to ignore the presented curriculum and do whatever you wanted.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#145

Post by kelnos »

danans wrote: post #103
socalgal2 wrote: post #99

I can hardly wait for all the WFT->RTO charts :P

> I can hardly wait for all the WFT->RTO charts :P Work from ... Texas?

Ah yes, those years when we were all allowed to Work from Texas, and then all our bosses wanted us to Return to Ohio.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#146

Post by kelnos »

protocolture wrote: post #70

Correlation/Causation issues as others have pointed out. But also, complete inability of schools to adapt. Refusing to adapt to the reality that is, students will be living their entire lives with these devices, and that they should be working out ways to ensure student productivity despite their existence, is not the same thing as success. Teachers are inherently lazy. Its one of their more human qualities. But real…

Perhaps I'm just lacking in imagination, but I'm not sure how having smartphones in class meaningfully enhances the educational experience. I could see a tablet for note-taking being useful, perhaps. (Or a more limited device like a Remarkable, which IIRC isn't a general-purpose touchscreen computer.)

Kids can prepare to live in a world with these things in their pockets outside of school. Sure, primary school is about learning all sorts of things, not just what the teacher is lecturing about. But it doesn't have to be about everything, and I think it's fair to make the call that the distraction caused by smartphones (especially with all the apps designed to addict users) outweighs any positive teachable moments with them present.

Your anecdote is interesting because it didn't really bring me to the same conclusion. Kids aren't going to be interested in every single subject, but we believe it's important to expose them to a bit of everything regardless. Maybe your classmate just didn't care about math, but enjoyed English and reading, and found that much more engaging. Maybe there was absolutely nothing the math teacher could have done to get that kid to pay attention all the time, even if they were the best teacher in the world.

> he would copy out all the answers from the back of the textbook to his workbook, and he would hand that in.

That's really the big flaw here. If he hadn't been able to do that, his grades would suffer, and someone, whether the teacher or his parents, would have (hopefully!) stepped in to see what was going on, and find a way to curb his game-playing in class. Maybe that would have meant he wasn't allowed to have the laptop out in that particular class until he could demonstrate that he could use it appropriately.

> Teachers are inherently lazy.

I know quite a few teachers, and calling teachers lazy is so mind-blowingly, disrespectfully inaccurate that it's really hard to take your opinions seriously. Sure, in every walk of life you'll find lazy people, but I see no evidence that teachers are on average lazier than people in any other profession. My take on it is that teachers might be on average less lazy than your average human.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#147

Post by rixed »

RandomBacon wrote: post #117
Mistletoe wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they need to contact their kids they can call the school to talk to them in the very rare case that is actually necessary. It was quite nice and refreshing to have the umbilical cut to your parents while you were at school in the past. You had to learn how to be on your own. If there is a school shooting, what is texting their kid going to do?

> what is texting their kid going to do? Those parents don't realize it's going to get their kid shot when the kid is hiding and the gunman hears the ding or buzz of the notification.

Match what's been reported by some Bataclan attack survivors: not only you had to play dead, but your phone had to play dead too.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#148

Post by kelnos »

ryandrake wrote: post #31
gpt5 wrote: post #15

This is an area where hacker news shows its weakness. We have: 1. A chart showing a very low increase (1-2 percent) 2. Nothing to control scores rising in every school in America in the last school year (due to reduction of COVID effects). 3. Scores not moving immediately after the ban, but only after the start of a new school year, which means a new cohort of students muddying the data. Yet the data fits people's bi…

There's no study that's good enough for HN. I don't think I've ever seen a science or research article posted here that didn't immediately get picked apart for this or that in the comment section. The methodology is flawed. The data is flawed. The conclusions cannot be drawn. There are confounding variables not accounted for. The sources are questionable. It's become a trope at this point. Either our commenters' stan…

And on top of that, I expect most of the complaints about all these studies are made by people who have never designed or run a study or research program of any kind in their entire life.

It's that common phenomenon where people think they can use general logic (which they generally are good at) to draw strong conclusions about something that isn't in their wheelhouse. I'm certainly guilty of it myself, sometimes.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#150

Post by kelnos »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #45
gpt5 wrote: post #15

This is an area where hacker news shows its weakness. We have: 1. A chart showing a very low increase (1-2 percent) 2. Nothing to control scores rising in every school in America in the last school year (due to reduction of COVID effects). 3. Scores not moving immediately after the ban, but only after the start of a new school year, which means a new cohort of students muddying the data. Yet the data fits people's bi…

The lack of control and cohort following are legitimate criticisms. The effect size is not. Even a single-digit percentage increase over a single year from policy treatment is incredibly impressive when we open the door to cumulative effects. > Yet the data fits people's biases It does. But it also fits priors, particularly those we've seen documented when it comes to teens and social media.

> But it also fits priors

I know that it's important to look at data and not rely on our own assumptions and "common sense" about things (as reality can often be surprising).

But.

Based on how kids seem to actually use their phones in class (that is, not all that much for educational things related to the coursework at hand), and based on what we know (conclusive study after conclusive study) about how by-design addictive social media and smartphone games are, it's honestly hard to take seriously the idea that smartphone use in class hasn't hurt education and test scores.

Priors matter!

Post reply on HN