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School cell phone bans and student achievement

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Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#41

Post by phantasmish »

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…

We weren't allowed to have any of several different individual devices the functions of which are present in a smartphone. Banning that stuff was more-or-less uncontroversial. Obviously kids in an ordinary classroom shouldn't have instant cameras, and video recorders, and audio recorders, and Walkmen, and radios, and game boys, and TVs, and flashlights, and...

Now we have devices that are all of those things in one and parents will fight you if you try to keep kids from having or using them. Go figure.

What's baffling is why so many more people started thinking all those devices were OK when they're combined into one device. Like, not much of this is novel, we could have had devices that did most of the relevant things a smartphone does, in class. But we didn't because of fucking course they weren't permitted.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#42

Post by HPsquared »

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…

Maybe most studies actually are junk.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#43

Post by phantasmish »

moduspol wrote: post #11
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.

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.

Ever watch The Wire? The school in that show is a very accurate depiction of what a... middling-bad inner city school is like. There are tons of ones worse than it (they may have shied away from one of that sort either because it didn't suit the story, or because they thought too many viewers would think they were exaggerating)

There are schools where the administrators are too busy dealing with violence to have time for much else.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#44

Post by phantasmish »

eitally wrote: post #9
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…

I think you're correct, but another piece of this is that students (especially in HS, but probably also in MS) have realized they can accomplish most assigned tasks in a fraction of the time using online resources (whether copies of old tests, agentic AI, or other sites), so they lean on their phone for this. A big piece of the missing equation here is the fact that home PC/laptop use has also been consistently decre…

Funnily enough, as a parent, I'd have loved for my (young-ish at the time) kids to have been on old-school pencil and paper stuff during the pandemic.

Tear-out worksheet books or a weekly trip to the schools to grab a packet of physical papers with the week's lessons and work (or, hell, send the buses around to drop them off) would have been SO MUCH easier to manage and help with than all the online horse-shit.

Like, I truly think my 80s and 90s classrooms would have been better prepared to deal with the pandemic than the modern computerized ones. You'd think it'd be the other way around, but from what I saw, no. It's just so much harder to keep track of what's going on in several different computer programs, than a stack of paper and a couple books for each kid.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#45

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#46

Post by nemomarx »

nineplay wrote: post #40
nemomarx wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was it not like this, though? I think people are rosey about the past here. A small educated set was different in the past but probably the bulk of the population has always done something like this - now you can hear them online easier.

We didn't always have bad actors directly injecting rage-bait into our blood streams.

Not as tuned for engagement as now, but we had to have yellow journalism laws for a reason too. There's always been lots of propaganda and manipulation and bad actors in journalism.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#47

Post by [deleted] »

tylermw wrote: post #14
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…

When you're dealing with large populations (here, the study include 230,065 students--a very large number), even small shifts due to some treatment can be significant. It is very hard to generate top-down policy interventions that shift the mean of a population in significant ways: if this treatment effect (banning phones) is real, 1.1 points represents a very big policy win that can easily be applied elsewhere. The…

[deleted]

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#48

Post by doctorpangloss »

uniqueuid wrote: post #26
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…

Ok here is the crucial part of the paper: It's a difference in differences design, using individual-level test scores and de-seasonalized data (p. 13). Their wording is: > Y_igst is the outcome of interest for student i in grade g in school s in time period t, HighAct_s is an indicator for high pre-ban smartphone activity schools, D_t is a series of time period dummies (t = 0 indicates the first period after the ban…

what it means is that this paper shows probable causality and models a lot of interesting features. it is most definitely not flawed.

i think the tough thing is that 0.6 percentage points gain for the average student is quite small. it's actually less than you gain by studying for 1h for the SAT, which is probably about 0.9 percentage points, depending on how you interpret college board's research (it recommends 20h of studying). that is to say, if students studied one fucking hour for the FAST, they would probably get a bigger benefit on it than all the time they get back not looking at their phones throughout two years of school.

so whatever cell phone use (1) in school (2) causes, it causes a small effect on test scores.

you would have to pick some other objective criteria, for example mental health assessment, for maybe a larger effect, or seek a larger treatment, perhaps a complete ban of cell phones period, to observe a larger effect.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#49

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

Yeah I'm not that far out of high school but my school in the late 00's had a library policy on phones. You can keep them in your pocket, but don't bring them out during school. Otherwise they get taken for the class time, and it escalates from there.

This included recess and pretty much extended to all non-calculator electronic devices, but it was generally more lax when you weren't disrupting someone. I couldn't imagine brazenly having my phone out while a teacher was talking unless it was an emergency.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#50

Post by johnnyanmac »

AAAAaccountAAAA wrote: post #5
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 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?

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