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School cell phone bans and student achievement

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Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#191

Post by JeremyNT »

huhkerrf wrote: post #135
japhyr wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, and you can point out the stats all day long, but you're not going to defeat irrational parental concerns with this One Weird Trick.

So much of the way we treat education is based on vibes rather than reality.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#192

Post by graybeardhacker »

If I understand the graph correctly, it looks like there's maybe a three percentage point increase. But given there is a 1 percentage point delta in the pre-ban data, that would seem to indicate there is at least a 1 point variation that must be ignored as irrelevant.

I'm not sure how they generated the error bars but that, to me, would suggest the relevant error could be +/- 1 percentage point. Meaning the delta could be at little as two percentage points.

My intuition says cellphone bans would have a positive impact, but I don't think I'd call this data conclusive. I'd want to see more data from earlier and later.

Also, if these are the same students, then test scores might be reflecting increased maturity. If it's different students of the same age, it could be a shift in some extra-educational factors affecting the younger generation.

Too many unknowns and not enough signal.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#193

Post by tootie »

etskinner wrote: post #166
tootie wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Citywide bans for schools, not everyone.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#194

Post by card_zero »

pessimizer wrote: post #185
card_zero wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but I didn't know the word "assembler". I was completely bewildered about why BASIC produced clunky results and I could barely phrase the question about how proper games were made. Local libraries didn't have relevant books. I didn't know there was help in magazines. The most clued-up adults wouldn't know either, and would be trying to get me interested in programming turtle bots with LOGO. What I needed was to ask the internet (which didn't exist yet).

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#195

Post by lo_zamoyski »

silisili wrote: post #125
lo_zamoyski wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the lesson is understanding how we got here. The answer is, of course, liberal hyperindividualism. By that I don't mean "liberal institutions" or respect for the individual person especially in the face of collectivism, but an ideology of antisocial atomization of the self that thrusts the self into subjective godhood. Paradoxically, this makes people more susceptible to control in practice. Now, ideological…

Leaving out the word liberal as I don't really understand its context here, individualism was at one time a boon for the nation/economy. People move out of their family homes early, start their own family, chart their own path. Good for capitalism. And good for lots of things, really, a lot of America's success can be traced back to it. But man, social media and the internet age have really exploited it to an unhealt…

> Leaving out the word liberal as I don't really understand its context here

I mean "liberal" in the philosophical sense, not the ill-defined, often pejorative partisan sense (in a philosophical sense, both major US political parties are liberal parties; we live in a liberal political order). One can support liberal institutions while rejecting the ideology along with its false anthropology, presupposed metaphysics and thus ethics.

The basic failure of liberalism lies in its definition of "freedom" which boils down to the ability to do whatever you choose, an absence of any restraint or constraint. Compare this with the classical definition of freedom as the ability to do what is objectively good. True freedom only exists in being able to exercise your nature as a human being. That's what flourishing means. The heart of such freedom is virtue and thus morality. The ability to do drugs or watch porn or sleep around or whatever is contrary to the good of the person doing those things. They do not make a person free. Immoral acts imprison and cripple the person committing them in the very act of committing them.

> individualism was at one time a boon for the nation/economy

I'm not talking about economic freedom. Economic freedom is always subject to various constraints. Some (good) regulation is necessary to protect the common good on which we all depend.

I'm talking about an anthropology that conceives of human beings in a way that denies or misrepresents their social nature and denies their obligations and duties toward others, and misunderstands freedom.

> People move out of their family homes early, start their own family, chart their own path.

I'm also not talking about having the liberty to make all sorts of life choices. What would the alternative be? And people today aren't moving out of the house. They're living with mom and dad into their 30s, maybe longer. Yet liberalism marches on.

And that's perhaps part of the lesson. If we draw out the conclusions of liberal premises and cross them with human nature and the human condition, we find that liberalism's inner contradictions cause it to implode on itself, producing what might appear to be paradoxical results. After all, shouldn't liberalism have given us a freer, better world? This is the part where its defenders will blame external factors, which raises all sorts of new questions about how that is possible.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#196

Post by IAmBroom »

throwawaylaptop wrote: post #189
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.

That is an amazingly vague post. You've convinced me!

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#197

Post by jdalgetty »

kakacik wrote: post #156
jdalgetty wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The other side of it - why can't parents set up screen time and app limits, especially during school hours? No kid needs access to clash royale or snapchat during the school day. The phone should be locked down to "essentials" like the calculator, etc.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#198

Post by pavel_lishin »

> There were no statistically significant changes in test scores during the first year of the ban, when disciplinary rates were high. During the second year of the ban, in contrast, test scores increased significantly, with positive effects concentrated during the spring semester (scores increased 1.1 percentiles, on average). The researchers suggest that this may be due to the higher stakes of spring tests, which can affect grade advancement and high school graduation. Test score improvements were also concentrated among male students (up 1.4 percentiles, on average) and among middle and high school students (up 1.3 percentiles, on average).

> When comparing high-effect and low-effect schools, the researchers note significant reductions in unexcused absences during the two years following the cell phone ban. They posit that increased attendance could explain as much as half of the test score improvements noted in their primary analysis.

Seems to me like there wasn't a huge improvement, and the improvement seen could easily be attributed to other things, no?

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#199

Post by throwawaylaptop »

IAmBroom wrote: post #196
throwawaylaptop wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is an amazingly vague post. You've convinced me!

Hah. When I write concrete statements someone always comes by and says that's wrong, or a bigoted view. So Ive been trying to see if letting people figure out the obvious answer themselves works better.

Obviously the place without headphones do way better.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#200

Post by mghackerlady »

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 disagree. You see less depictions of beer or wine addicts despite them (at least from my experience) making up the majority of high-functioning alcoholics. I don't know for sure why they're depicted less, but my running theory is a combination of not being tragic enough for drama focused on alcoholism and being played for jokes with things like the "wine mom" stereotype. They also tend to be a lot better at hiding their alcoholism due to their type of drinking being more accepted. They have a different relationship with alcohol, but not necessarily a better one (arguably a more dangerous one due to the relative societal acceptance of their type of alcoholism).
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