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School cell phone bans and student achievement

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Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#61

Post by japhyr »

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 than most people realize. If it's top down and not supported by just about everyone, then many teachers and staff find themselves in endless battles. It takes more consistency and clarity of vision, and consistent enforcement than many schools are capable of.

Last, the devices students carry with them are often more capable and reliable than school based technology. So when students need to look something up, it's easy for them to just pull out their device.

Super-addictive devices in a society that's prioritizing many of the wrong things is a hard thing to manage. How many of you would give up your tech salaries to make $40-60k to take on these issues?

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#62

Post by protocolture »

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…

"What if coworker I disapproved of but society"

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#63

Post by RegW »

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…

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 wasteful time sink, so I resolved to completely stop using the social media of its time, and have avoided most incarnations of it ever since (but here I am).

As a scouter working with teenagers, 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. I know that some simply won't finish school without strong guidance, but delaying exposure to this might just be worse in the long term.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#64

Post by knollimar »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #52
phantasmish wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I really don't understand why the parents would fight for them. My theoretical kid is there to learn, enforce any reasonable rules that can disrupt that goal. It's also in general a good way to form work habits for future aspects. Be it college, a job, military, etc. You can't fight over having your phone out to your boss. You can do it to your professor, but that's your $20k/yr tuition talking.

>You can't fight over having your phone out to your boss

Give me a company phone or you don't get this rule. I'm not using my phone for work if I can't have it out during work.

I use it 99% for work related things during work, though, with the 1% being happy birthday texts or something similar

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#65

Post by RandallBrown »

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?

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#66

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

There are of course bigger problems, but it seems like phones are one of those "attainable" problems for a school to fix.

Schools aren't exactly much better equipped to make sure parents don't both need to work 50 hours to survive, nor bring housing prices down. They can barely pay their teachers to begin with.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#67

Post by knollimar »

HPsquared wrote: post #42
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…

Maybe most studies actually are junk.

At least the ones with attention grabbing headlines

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#68

Post by calderwoodra »

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…

Article about smartphones being bad? Right to the top.

Generic comment that would fit in the comment section of any of those articles? Right to the top.

I get baited into reading these posts and comments every day - why can't I stop? Probably for the same reason these posts and comments get up votes.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#69

Post by nomel »

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.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#70

Post by protocolture »

Correlation/Causation issues as others have pointed out.

But also, complete inability of schools to adapt.

Refusing to adapt to the reality that is, students will be living their entire lives with these devices, and that they should be working out ways to ensure student productivity despite their existence, is not the same thing as success.

Teachers are inherently lazy. Its one of their more human qualities. But really they need to adapt, or fail and be replaced.

There was a kid in my class in highschool. We had a school that permitted laptops, one of the first near us, but situationally. Teachers could exclude, or instruct the student to not use the laptop for periods during class. However policy was that students were allowed to use the laptop any time they could use a workbook. This kid was the only one who both had access to a laptop and was willing to risk damaging it by bringing it to school.

Math class with this kid was:

1. He plays games on his laptop unless the teacher was looking, in which case he would be solving problems in excel or notepad. Proficient alt tab user.

2. At the end of class, he would copy out all the answers from the back of the textbook to his workbook, and he would hand that in.

English was different. In english the teacher built a relationship with him and engaged him directly. If he was unresponsive he might be forced back to attention somehow, asked a direct question about the text, but that was true of a lot of the students. The entire class was a discussion on book content. When he used the laptop, he was using it to write notes because he was engaged through positive reinforcement. If the teacher caught him playing, the teacher would on those rare occasions, engage him about the game. Often, he had finished his assigned reading\tasks early and simply drifted over. In that case he was left to play because he wasn't disrupting anyone.

Phone bans are a crutch for lazy, uninterested educators. Kids need to be prepared to live in a world with these things in their pockets. The correct dopamine reward feedback loops are not going to be built by banning them entirely. And being better at rote learning and regurgitating ancient course material isn't a strong indicator, if it was even an indicator, of better student outcomes.

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