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School cell phone bans and student achievement

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Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#181

Post by accrual »

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…

In my case phones were just starting to become commonplace, the Razr was the coolest phone to have, we had iPods but not iPhones, etc. Most instructors didn't want to see any phones and would threaten to take them away, so we became skilled at using T9 under the desk or in sweatshirt pockets, etc.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#182

Post by amai »

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 chart is showing percentiles not percent. Put your smartphone away before posting on HN.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#183

Post by Aldipower »

nicbou wrote: post #174
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'm trying, but it's so hard! I put my phone in a drawer. Everything's in silent mode. I have a fully disconnected, distraction-free iPad for reading and writing. Work only happens on the computer. There are no emails on the phone. Yet, I can't fully disconnect. Every device, every account, every app mixes work stuff and personal life stuff. And software is so sticky! I can't just check one thing without my attention…

I learned to hate smartphones, so I threw it literally away. People can write me an email or call me on my landline. On the desktop I am using Debian with WindowMaker. This is enjoyably distraction free. I am a free man.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#184

Post by pessimizer »

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's the very real pressure from parents to be able to contact their kids when they need to.

A lot of parents are addicted to texting back and forth with their kids all day. I imagine many of the kids hate it.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#185

Post by pessimizer »

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.

We definitely did. You should have gone to a library. I got my first Prolog compiler, C++ compiler, and microcontroller programming manual from Salvation Army thrift stores. There were like a million magazines you could buy.

edit: I forgot the Standard ML book, also from some thrift store. All circa late-80s, early-90s. I still have them all.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#186

Post by Cthulhu_ »

greg_V wrote: post #171
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…

We were promised a borderless world and instead got one without boundaries.

And now we're clamouring to reinstate them. Not just digitally (in the form of e.g. limitations and boundaries on attention demanding apps and activities), but politically / internationally as well, if you lean that way.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#187

Post by welcome_dragon »

kelnos wrote: post #141
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!)

I'm a little older than you (mid fifties) and back in my day we couldn't have walkmans/headphones on inside the school. I walked so in the winter I would wear headphones instead of earmuffs/hats (had to rock that 80's hair) and got in trouble all the time. Like one step in the building and busted.

I think the biggest barrier to a phone ban being more widely adopted is parents. My wife works in the front office of a middle school and parents lose their minds if a kid gets their phone taken away. "But but but what if I NEED to get ahold of my kid during the day?". Umm... You ask the school to get your kid? I dunno seems pretty straightforward.

Then again I'm in an affluent area where moms against liberty (as I call them) are prevalent so maybe it's just the people here?

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#188

Post by malshe »

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 they do all this by reading the abstract.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#189

Post by throwawaylaptop »

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 work in construction saas of a certain kind, and when I visit customers there is a very very clear difference in quality/size/revenue in companies that allow headphones and those that don't.

I'll let you decide which ones you think are doing better.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#190

Post by malshe »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #8

The increase in scores is really small. It’s 1.1 percentage points. My interpretation is, the pandemic is a root cause of lower test scores for many reasons, one reason is that kids started using cell phones way more during the pandemic, and that new stuff on the phone (TikTok, let’s be real) causes lower test scores. Reducing usage during school is addressing a real problem, but it’s one of many real problems, and s…

Where did you get 1.1 percentage point? The paper uses percentiles.

"Overall, we show that student test scores improved by 0.6 percentiles, with the ban increasing spring test scores 1.1 percentiles in the second year relative to the spring test right before the ban took effect. These positive test score effects are larger for male students (an effect of 1.4 percentiles on the spring test in the second year) and for students in middle and high schools (1.3 percentiles)."

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