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School cell phone bans and student achievement

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Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#151

Post by justinclift »

achikin wrote: post #134
emil-lp wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6174603/ The main idea here is that overuse not equals addiction.

The first part of the Results section says:

    [...] the majority of research in the field declares that smartphones are addictive
Though that section continues on to disagree with that majority, "the majority" declaring smartphones are addictive is certainly supportive of them being so.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#152

Post by izacus »

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…

It makes much more sense if you think of these threads as nerdsniping to support a preconcieved personal biases and addictions. Not very related to finding the truth.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#153

Post by izacus »

nxobject wrote: post #34
ryandrake wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No study is perfect – research is and has always been expensive, and playing devil's advocate while seeing the arc of promising research is one of the fundamental skills of reading and doing research.

Playing a devils advocate in topics you're not versed in or know the context just makes you a timewasting arsehole most of the time.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#154

Post by Kim_Bruning »

This is actually very sad. Finally every child had a computer in their pocket, but it turned out to be a locked down attention exploitation machine. I sincerely wish it wasn't.

That's why they're being banned all over. Citizens and governments finally got savvy to how bad these devices can really be, especially in the hands of the inexperienced.

Imagine if history had gone differently. Maybe history still can go differently. A portable computer in the hands of every child. One that actually works for them, not against them.

Are there people already working on this?

(I do know about eg. F-Droid, which is an improvement due to strict curation)

edit: Think of eg 'A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer' : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#156

Post by kakacik »

jdalgetty wrote: post #4
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…

When parents themselves also became addicted and decided it was easier to give their kids phones than to parent them.

This is bulk of the problem. Don't expect kids to do better when their role models screw up so badly. Sure some will come on top of their own parents but thats not the norm rather just an exception.

There is always the peer pressure excuse but thats not good enough. At the end who buys and setups and keeps paying for that phone?

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#157

Post by immibis »

mikemarsh wrote: post #39

Since when is a study needed to confirm that enabling a dopamine addiction, especially in developing minds, is a bad idea? Isn't our own direct experience as adults/parents struggling with said addictions enough?

Since a study is needed to determine if anything is true. Sometimes the study is simple: look out the window and see if it's raining. But this is not one of those.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#158

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

lazy_afternoons wrote: post #155

I am reasonably confident that Smart Phones will take the route of cigarettes. Restricted to adults over 21 years of age.

And then progressively banned in public places.

Which won't work. The model isn't an exact match.

I'd rather see hard content filters in certain contexts than a complete ban.

No social media sites, games, or messaging would remove most of the problem.

But the ultimate driver of addiction is ad-tech, and all of these measures would cause a significant hit to the ad industries.

So in practice it's easier simply to ban phones.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#159

Post by walthamstow »

rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #90
rootusrootus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they didn't have smartphones to fiddle with in bed This is solvable for people who want to. We have a dedicated charging station in our house for all electronic devices. Before bed, all of those devices get put there. Including me and my wife's phones.

How can you be contacted in case of an emergency in the middle of the night?

I've made my peace with the tiny, tiny chance that I might miss my father's last moments because I didn't hear about his heart attack til the morning, for example.

Living as if it might happen any time and I must be available for it is not healthy IMO.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#160

Post by nkrisc »

testing22321 wrote: post #80
RegW wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my first job out of university in the 80s, I spent all one night playing Knight Lore on the Spectrum with friends. I failed to get up the next morning. My boss drove across Leeds and to bang on the door to see if I was alright. I needed that job so I stopped playing computer games. In the 90s a later boss called me out for spending my days attached to the Slashdot firehose. I had sort-of known that it was a wastef…

> 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?

I mean, it does work for most people. Most people can drink responsibly. The alcoholics are the ones who can’t do it on their own.
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