Many school districts have instituted a bell-to-bell ban on smartphones in K-12 education, including all public schools in New York State, which also banned students’ personal laptops, tablets and smart watches, writes Dr. Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, in a New York Times essay.
Smartphone bans are a good idea but not a complete solution, because phones are not the only electronic devices students use at school. Nearly every middle and high school student — and a good number in the elementary grades as well — brings a laptop or tablet to school and uses it at home for homework.
Many of these devices are provided by schools. You might think that these school-issued devices allow only a limited number of functions, like access to classroom Canvas pages and Google Docs.
In a survey of American teenagers by the nonprofit Common Sense Media, one-fourth admitted they had seen pornographic content during the school day. Almost half of that group saw it on a school-issued device. Students watching porn in class doesn’t just affect the students themselves —it is disturbing on a number of levels.
Even when laptop abuse doesn’t reach this point, it still consumes a substantial amount of instructional time. One study of Michigan State college students found that they spent nearly 40 percent of class time scrolling social media, checking email or watching videos on their laptops — anything but their classwork.
School laptops are also distracting at home. Many allow unfettered access to YouTube, tempting students to watch an endless loop of videos instead of doing their homework. How can we expect 13-year-olds to focus on their assignments when a vast library of entertaining video content is a tab away?
Digital distraction is terrible for academic performance. In a study published in October in The Journal of Adolescence, I found that standardized test scores in math, reading and science fell significantly more in countries where students spent more time using electronic devices for leisure purposes during the school day than they did in countries where they spent less time.
If school districts want to improve their test scores, changing the way students use school-issued devices is critical. School IT departments should lock down devices much more securely so students can’t use them to watch TV shows, play games or continuously consume videos.
There should be districtwide policies that specifically disallow these types of uses and instruct teachers to embed educational videos on the classroom page instead of giving students unlimited access to YouTube.
Districts and teachers should also consider scaling back on the number of assignments that require a device to complete in the first place. A handwritten response to a reading assignment is one less opportunity to use to cut and paste an essay written by ChatGPT.
Parents should also have the option to opt out of receiving school-issued devices if their children struggle to focus while using laptops.
Districts could even eliminate school electronic devices entirely. One study of nearly 300,000 fourth and eighth graders in the United States found that students who spent more time using digital devices in language arts classes performed worse on reading tests. A 2018 meta-analysis found that reading on paper, compared with reading digitally, led to significantly better comprehension among students, from elementary school to college.
It once seemed like a good idea to give every child his or her own digital device, but it’s clear those policies have been a failure. It may be possible to have little to no device use in lower grades and high school students given laptops strictly limited to relevant apps. Creating completely device-free schools with rare exceptions for students with special needs would return to the textbooks, paper and pencil of previous eras — when the most significant classroom distraction was students passing notes.
Many adults struggle to concentrate on work when social media, shopping and movies are just a click away. It’s much more difficult for a 16-year-old, or an 11-year-old, to focus when in the same situation. Asking students to drill down on their schoolwork amid an array of digital distractions isn’t just bad for test scores; it is inimical to learning.
The New York Times
