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School cell phone bans and student achievement

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Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#161

Post by assimpleaspossi »

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 owned a string of fast food restaurants. I had the ability to not hire anyone under age 20 if I didn't have to. When I did, the requirement was that they be in college but, in every case, I found that these kids, who returned for summer work every year, did a lot of growing up between the ages of 18 and 20.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#162

Post by moduspol »

lmm wrote: post #126
moduspol wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the teachers and schools cannot implement a phone ban because the students won't listen to them, it might be time to reassess what their purpose is.

Are you saying that from a perspective where the purpose of schools is to offer an education, or to keep kids locked up and be cheaper than daycare?

My phrasing suggests that. I was having trouble thinking of a non-offensive way to say, "I don't think the kids can possibly be learning much if the teachers and administration are incapable of implementing a phone ban."

Parent comment described them as "chaotic." I'm not even sure I'd describe them as "schools." But to more clearly answer your question: I think it's fair to question what their actual purpose is (and it doesn't seem to be education), but I don't think it was anyone's explicit intention to make them that way.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#163

Post by aa-jv »

i_c_b wrote: post #10

Back in the late 90s, when I first entered the video game industry to work (when it was quite scruffy, countercultural, and populated by some pretty odd people), one of the first things I encountered was a new co-worker who, next to his giant tower of used Mountain Dew cans, had a black and white TV in his cubicle. This struck me as very odd at that moment in time - as I understood things, obviously the point of work…

I've always had a TV or screen of some sort, devoted to background music or light films, just to fill in the void between lines of code. For some, having such light stuff going on is a productivity booster. I once got a dev team that had been struggling to get things finished, well and truly over the finish line, by putting a fat TV in the room, and giving folks the ability to line up their playlists for the day, as long as it wasn't too violent/inappropriate for the workplace.

We side-watched a ton of stuff together as a team - it was great for morale - and we actually shipped stuff, too. Of course the TV eventually became a console for the build server, but it was always available to anyone to put something on in the background, if they wanted to. Definitely a nice way to get a team to be a bit more coherent - as long as whats being played isn't too crazy.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#164

Post by technothrasher »

apical_dendrite wrote: post #77
HPsquared wrote: post #7

I wonder if there's a hidden confounding selection bias here, i.e. "ability of the school to ban phones". This is probably easier in less chaotic schools where the students listen to the teachers, say.

A lot of schools implement this by having the students put their phones in a locked pouch when they enter the building in the morning. https://www.overyondr.com/phone-locking-pouch This generally takes it out of the hands of individual classroom teachers.

My son's school had the kids all put their phone in a "phone hotel" in the admin's office in the morning, and pick them up in the afternoon. This was fine, except, 1) a lot of kids just put a burner phone in and kept their actual phone hidden in their bag, and 2) the kids were all required to use laptops for class, which could do everything their phones could do.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#165

Post by sharperguy »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #154

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 diff…

I'm thinking of this as I read this thread. How do you solve the problem of social media firehoses while still allowing kids to have access to the vast wealth of information and advice that the internet provides? It hasn't been so many years since many were predicting that the internet will make schools themselves obsolete.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#166

Post by etskinner »

tootie wrote: post #112
ryuhhnn wrote: post #16

Some very important context that the researchers don't mention: during the same period that they are claiming test scores improved because of phone bans, Florida changed the way they administer standardised tests. Starting in 2024, they switched from doing one end-of-year assessment and started administering more frequent tests throughout the year in order to better gauge a student's progress and provide a tighter fe…

This is also very closely following the pandemic. I'd imagine that massively pollutes their data. I didn't see a comparison to comparable districts that didn't implement a ban. Just from anecdata of my own kids, enforcement is nearly impossible. Phones are banned citywide as of this year but it sounds like they are still being used pretty openly.

Since when are cities banning phones? And how?

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#167

Post by mavhc »

nomel wrote: post #69
RandallBrown wrote: post #65

Are students really allowed to be on their phones during class at a lot of schools? When I was in high school, we didn't have smartphones, but we had game boys, flip phones, and graphing calculators that could play games. If we were ever caught playing with any of these things we got in trouble. That seemed sufficient at the time, but is that not the case anymore?

iPads are required in some public school classrooms, in place of textbooks! There no "lockdown mode" that the teacher can enable, to lock to the apps/websites related to the lesson. It's INSANE.

Apple's Classroom says it allows locking to a single app

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/classroom/id1085319084

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#169

Post by bborud »

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…

> "In the US, regular school shootings have made this a complicated issue [...]"

That sentence really stood out to me. When (and where) I grew up this wasn't even a possibility one would consider. It reminds me how irrelevant my frame of reference is when trying to think about how to address difficulties facing schools, educators and pupils today.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#170

Post by skeeter2020 »

achikin wrote: post #132
rossjudson wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

this is thoroughly debunked with hard data from distracted driving laws that focus on phone use while driving. We have the luxury of both before and after data and across different jurisidictions.
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