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School cell phone bans and student achievement

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Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#81

Post by rahimnathwani »

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 criticism would be valid if the researchers had studied just one group of schools, and their methodology was just comparing before and after. But that's not all they did. They had two groups of schools, with low/high cell phone use before the ban. Their hypothesis was that the schools with high cell phone use would see a larger change in test scores (as they would have the largest drop in mobile phone usage).

  We then turn to our causal analysis comparing schools with different degrees of apparent pre-ban student cellphone use, after vs. before Florida’s cellphone ban. We show that the ban increased disciplinary incidents and suspensions significantly in the first year, immediately after the district started referring students for disciplinary action for cellphone use infractions. In particular, our difference-in-differences estimates suggest that the ban increased suspension rates by 12 percent (relative to the comparison group mean) and in-school suspension rates by roughly 20 percent in the first year.
There may be other reasons to criticize the paper, of course.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#82

Post by Muromec »

testing22321 wrote: post #80
RegW wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wastef…

> 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 That approach doesn’t work so well for people with drug and alcohol addictions/dependancies. What makes you think this is different?

That approach works more often than it doesn’t — outside of certain spiraling situations most people don’t became alcoholics and drug addicts.

Some however do, which is why drugs and alcohol are controlled to some degree.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#84

Post by SchemaLoad »

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.

Some parents message their kids all through the day, they treat it as some kind of social media. Making kids focus on school instead of immediately replying to text messages upsets the parents.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#86

Post by phantasmish »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #84
johnnyanmac wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some parents message their kids all through the day, they treat it as some kind of social media. Making kids focus on school instead of immediately replying to text messages upsets the parents.

I know a bunch of teachers. This is true.

Some (like, one or two per hundred students or so) may occasionally call their kid when they know they’re in class. Not because there’s a family emergency or something (and c’mon, you can still call the office for that) but just to shoot the shit. Talk about a WTF.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#88

Post by AuthorizedCust »

RegW wrote: post #63
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 wastef…

> As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually…

Fellow Scouter here. Lots of Scout units in the USA have cell phone bans. That’s such an obsolete policy. We need to help the Scouts model good choices, and that doesn’t happen when decision opportunities are removed.

Also, if they are buried in their phones, take that as feedback on how much fun they are[n’t] having in your Scout unit.

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#89

Post by Mistletoe »

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…

If they need to contact their kids they can call the school to talk to them in the very rare case that is actually necessary. It was quite nice and refreshing to have the umbilical cut to your parents while you were at school in the past. You had to learn how to be on your own.

If there is a school shooting, what is texting their kid going to do?

Re: School cell phone bans and student achievement

#90

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

rootusrootus wrote: post #37
Ferret7446 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still had clear boundaries. They slept in the sleeping place and at the sleeping time, they worked at the working place and at the working time. See, they didn't have smartphones to fiddle with in bed.

> they didn't have smartphones to fiddle with in bed This is solvable for people who want to. We have a dedicated charging station in our house for all electronic devices. Before bed, all of those devices get put there. Including me and my wife's phones.

How can you be contacted in case of an emergency in the middle of the night?
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