essay on banning cell phones in college

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Bans may help protect classroom focus, but districts need to stay mindful of students’ sense of connection, experts say

Students around the world are being separated from their phones.

In 2020, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that 77 percent of U.S. schools had moved to prohibit cellphones for nonacademic purposes. In September 2018, French lawmakers outlawed cellphone use for schoolchildren under the age of 15. In China, phones were banned country-wide for schoolchildren last year.

Supporters of these initiatives have cited links between smartphone use and bullying and social isolation and the need to keep students focused on schoolwork.

77% Of U.S. schools moved to ban cellphones for nonacademic purposes as of 2020, according to the National Center for Education Statistics

But some Harvard experts say instructors and administrators should consider learning how to teach with tech instead of against it, in part because so many students are still coping with academic and social disruptions caused by the pandemic. At home, many young people were free to choose how and when to use their phones during learning hours. Now, they face a school environment seeking to take away their main source of connection.

“Returning back to in-person, I think it was hard to break the habit,” said Victor Pereira, a lecturer on education and co-chair of the Teaching and Teaching Leadership Program at the Graduate School of Education.

Through their students, he and others with experience both in the classroom and in clinical settings have seen interactions with technology blossom into important social connections that defy a one-size-fits-all mindset. “Schools have been coming back, trying to figure out, how do we readjust our expectations?” Pereira added.

It’s a hard question, especially in the face of research suggesting that the mere presence of a smartphone can undercut learning .

Michael Rich , an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and an associate professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, says that phones and school don’t mix: Students can’t meaningfully absorb information while also texting, scrolling, or watching YouTube videos.

“The human brain is incapable of thinking more than one thing at a time,” he said. “And so what we think of as multitasking is actually rapid-switch-tasking. And the problem with that is that switch-tasking may cover a lot of ground in terms of different subjects, but it doesn’t go deeply into any of them.”

Pereira’s approach is to step back — and to ask whether a student who can’t resist the phone is a signal that the teacher needs to work harder on making a connection. “Two things I try to share with my new teachers are, one, why is that student on the phone? What’s triggering getting on your cell phone versus jumping into our class discussion, or whatever it may be? And then that leads to the second part, which is essentially classroom management.

“Design better learning activities, design learning activities where you consider how all of your students might want to engage and what their interests are,” he said. He added that allowing phones to be accessible can enrich lessons and provide opportunities to use technology for school-related purposes.

Mesfin Awoke Bekalu, a research scientist in the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at the Chan School, argues that more flexible classroom policies can create opportunities for teaching tech-literacy and self-regulation.

“There is a huge, growing body of literature showing that social media platforms are particularly helpful for people who need resources or who need support of some kind, beyond their proximate environment,” he said. A study he co-authored by Rachel McCloud and Vish Viswanath for the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness shows that this is especially true for marginalized groups such as students of color and LGBTQ students. But the findings do not support a free-rein policy, Bekalu stressed.

In the end, Rich, who noted the particular challenges faced by his patients with attention-deficit disorders and other neurological conditions, favors a classroom-by-classroom strategy. “It can be managed in a very local way,” he said, adding: “It’s important for parents, teachers, and the kids to remember what they are doing at any point in time and focus on that. It’s really only in mono-tasking that we do very well at things.”

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Why Schools Should Ban Cell Phones in the Classroom—and Why Parents Have to Help

New study shows it takes a young brain 20 minutes to refocus after using a cell phone in a classroom

Photo by skynesher/iStock

Parents, the next time you are about to send a quick trivial text message to your students while they’re at school—maybe sitting in a classroom—stop. And think about this: it might take them only 10 seconds to respond with a thumbs-up emoji, but their brain will need 20 minutes to refocus on the algebra or history or physics lesson in front of them— 20 minutes .

That was just one of the many findings in a recent report from a 14-country study by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) that prompted this headline in the Washington Post : “Schools should ban smartphones. Parents should help.” The study recommends a ban on smartphones at school for students of all ages, and says the data are unequivocal, showing that countries that enforce restrictions see improved academic performance and less bullying.

It’s a fraught debate, one that prompts frustration among educators, who say students are less focused than ever as schools struggle to enforce cell phone limitation policies, and rage from some parents, worrying about a possible shooting when they can’t get in touch, who insist they need to be able to reach their children at all times. And, perhaps surprisingly, it prompts a collective yawn from students.

In fact, students openly admit their cell phones distract them and that they focus better in school without them, says Joelle Renstrom , a senior lecturer in rhetoric at Boston University’s College of General Studies. It’s an issue she has studied for years. She even performed an experiment with her students that supports what she long suspected: Cell Phones + Classrooms = Bad Learning Environment.

BU Today spoke with Renstrom about the latest study and research.

with Joelle Renstrom

Bu today: let me get right to the point. do we as a society need to be better about restricting cell phones in classrooms it seems so obvious..

Renstrom: Of course. But it is easier said than done. It’s hard to be consistent. We will always have students with some kind of reason, or a note from someone, that gives them access to technology. And then it becomes hard to explain why some people can have it and some people can’t. But student buy-in to the idea is important.

BU Today: But is getting students to agree more important than getting schools and parents to agree? Is it naive to think that students are supposed to follow the rules that we as parents and teachers set for them?

Renstrom: I have made the case before that addiction to phones is kind of like second-hand smoking. If you’re young and people around you are using it, you are going to want it, too. Every baby is like that. They want to reach for it, it’s flashing, their parents are on it all the time. Students openly acknowledge they are addicted. Their digital lives are there. But they also know there is this lack of balance in their lives. I do think buy-in is important. But do it as an experiment. Did it work? What changes did it make? Did it make you anxious or distracted during those 50 minutes in class? I did that for years. I surveyed students for a number of semesters; how do you feel about putting your phone in a pouch? They made some predictions and said what they thought about how annoying it was. But at the end, they talked about how those predictions [played out], and whether they were better able to focus. It was very, very clear they were better able to focus. Also interestingly, not a single student left during class to get a drink or go to the bathroom. They had been 100 percent doing that just so they could use their phone.

BU Today: Should we be talking about this question, cell phones in classrooms, for all ages, middle school all the way through college? Or does age matter?

Renstrom: It’s never going to be universal. Different families, different schools. And there is, on some level, a safety issue. I do not blame parents for thinking, if there’s someone with a gun in school, I need a way to reach my kids. What if all the phones are in pouches when someone with a gun comes in? It’s crazy that we even have to consider that.

BU Today: What’s one example of something that can be changed easily?

Renstrom: Parents need to stop calling their kids during the day. Stop doing that. What you are doing is setting that kid up so that they are responding to a bot 24-7 when they shouldn’t be. If you’re a kid who gets a text from your parent in class, you are conditioned to respond and to know that [the parent] expects a response. It adds so much anxiety to people’s lives. It all just ends up in this anxiety loop. When kids are in school, leave them alone. Think about what that phone is actually meant for. When you gave them a phone, you said it’s in case of an emergency or if you need to be picked up in a different place. Make those the parameters. If it’s just to confirm, “I’m still picking you up at 3,” then no, don’t do that. Remember when we didn’t have to confirm? There is a time and place for this, for all technology.

BU Today: This latest study, how do you think people will react to it?

Renstrom: This isn’t new. How many studies have to come out to say that cured meat is terrible and is carcinogenic. People are like, “Oh, don’t tell me what to eat. Or when to be on my phone.” This gets real contentious, real fast because telling people what’s good for them is hard.

BU Today: I can understand that—but in this case we’re not telling adults to stop being on their phones. We’re saying help get your kids off their phones in classrooms, for their health and education.

Renstrom: Studies show kids’ brains, and their gray matter, are low when they are on screens. School is prime habit-forming time. You should not sit in class within view of the professor, laughing while they are talking about World War II. There is a social appropriateness that needs to be learned. Another habit that needs to be addressed is the misconception of multitasking. We are under this misconception we all can do it. And we can’t. You might think, I can listen to this lecture while my sister texts me. That is not supported by science or studies. It is literally derailing you. Your brain jumps off to another track and has to get back on. If you think you have not left that first track, you are wrong.

BU Today: So what next steps would you like to see?

Renstrom: I would like to see both schools and families be more assertive about this. But also to work together. If the parents are anti-smartphone policy, it doesn’t matter if the school is pro-policy. If there is a war between parents and schools, I am not sure much will happen. Some kind of intervention and restriction is better than just ripping it away from kids. The UNESCO study found it is actually even worse for university students. We are all coming at this problem from all different ways. Pouches or banned phones. Or nothing.

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Doug Most is a lifelong journalist and author whose career has spanned newspapers and magazines up and down the East Coast, with stops in Washington, D.C., South Carolina, New Jersey, and Boston. He was named Journalist of the Year while at The Record in Bergen County, N.J., for his coverage of a tragic story about two teens charged with killing their newborn. After a stint at Boston Magazine , he worked for more than a decade at the Boston Globe in various roles, including magazine editor and deputy managing editor/special projects. His 2014 nonfiction book, The Race Underground , tells the story of the birth of subways in America and was made into a PBS/American Experience documentary. He has a BA in political communication from George Washington University. Profile

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Boston University moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected. Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (EST) and can only accept comments written in English. Statistics or facts must include a citation or a link to the citation.

There are 14 comments on Why Schools Should Ban Cell Phones in the Classroom—and Why Parents Have to Help

i found this very helpful with my research

It was a great research, helped me a lot.

I think that this was helpful, but there is an ongoing question at my school, which is, though phones may be negative to health and knowledge and they’re a distraction what happens if there was a shooting or a fire or a dangourus weather event and you don’t have a phone to tell your parents or guardians at home if you are alright? (Reply answer if have one)

Yeah they would get an amber alert

well, the school has the technology that can help communicate that to the parents, and if that were to happen, I guess that’s why there’s always a cell phone in the classrooms those old-time ones, but I feel it would not be okay in case of a shooting since you have to go silence, and on the moment of fire or weather everything happens so fast in the moment.

In schools all teachers have cell phones. So one way or the other the messages would get out to the parents as needed. If a student gets on the cell phone to inform the parent about the activity, that’s taken place it could cause panic. School staffs are informed as to how to handle such situations.. what I have seen take place in classes are students who are texting each other either in the same room or in another classroom during the school time. Many students spend time on YouTube and not concentrating what’s going on in the classroom.

I think that this was helpful, but there is an ongoing question at my school, which is, though phones may be negative to health and knowledge and they’re a distraction what happens if there is a shooting or a fire or a dangerous weather event and you don’t have a phone to tell your parents or guardians at home if you are alright?

I am writing a paper and this is very helpful thank you.

I am writing a paper and this is very helpful but it is true what if our mom or dad have to contact us we need phones!

this helped me with my school project about whether cell phones should be banned in school. I think yes but the class is saying no. I think it’s because I was raised without a phone so I know how to survive and contact my parents without a phone. but anyway, this helped me with my essay! thank you!

I don’t think phones should be allowed in school, and this is perfect backup! Thank you Doug

great infromation for debate

Thanks, this helped a lot I’m working on an essay and this has been really helpful.by the way, some people may think, but what if i need to call my mom/dad/guardian. but the real thing is, there is a high chance that there will be a telephone near you. or if it’s something that only you want them to know,go ahead and ask your teacher if you can go to the office.

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Cell phone use policies in the college classroom: Do they work?

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Shannise B. Jones , Mara S. Aruguete , Rachel Gretlein; Cell phone use policies in the college classroom: Do they work?. Transactions of the Missouri Academy of Science 1 January 2020; 48 (2020): 5–9. doi: https://doi.org/10.30956/MAS-31R1

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Our study examined the efficacy of lenient and restrictive cell phone policies. We expected that a lenient policy would be associated with lower quiz scores, greater anxiety, and lower GPA. Additionally, we expected students to self-report using their phones mostly for non-academic purposes. We gave one introductory psychology section a restrictive cell phone use policy while another section was given a lenient policy. We observed how often students used their phones during class in both conditions. At the end of the class period, students took a short quiz over the lecture material. Afterward, they were given a survey that measured demographics, attitudes about cell phone use in class, academic motivation, cell phone use domains, and anxiety. In the restrictive policy condition, students used their cell phones in class at a similar rate as in the lenient policy condition, suggesting that the restrictive cell phone policy was ineffective. Students operated their phones an average of about seven times during the 50-minute class period, mostly for non-academic purposes. Our results contribute to a body of literature showing that electronic devices distract students and decrease the efficacy of the learning environment.

Examining the relationship between cell phone use and the learning environment is critical in understanding contemporary college students. Most students report bringing their cell phones to class every day ( Froese, Carpenter, Inman, Schooley, Barnes, Brecht, & Chacon, 2012 ), and over 80% report using their phones at least one time in each class period ( Berry & Westfall, 2015 ). Smartphones give students endless academic resources at their fingertips. While cell phones allow students to quickly access information, they also introduce potentially negative effects on teaching and learning ( Burns & Lohenry, 2010 ). Classroom cell phone policies might help to mitigate negative effects of cell phones on student achievement ( Burns and Lohenry, 2010 ). Our study examines the efficacy of restrictive and lenient policies.

Many studies show that in-class cell phone use has predominantly harmful effects on student learning ( Bjornsen & Archer, 2015 ; Burns & Lohenry, 2010 ; Duncan, Hoekstra, & Wilcox, 2012 ; Froese et al., 2012 ; Junco & Cotten, 2012 ; Lepp, Barkley, & Karpinski, 2014 ). Using interviews, observations, and surveys, Duncan et al. (2012) found that the use of cell phones in class corresponded to a decline of nearly half of a letter grade in the course. Similarly, Froese et al. (2012) found that texting in class was associated with a 27% drop in student grades. A recent meta-analysis on a range of student outcome variables showed a negative relationship between cell phone use and student achievement ( Kates, Wu, & Coryn, 2018 ). Classroom cell phone use and its associated negative outcomes may be particularly likely in some learning environments (e.g., high enrollment classes with little active student participation; Berry & Westfall, 2015 ).

Some authors have argued that classroom cell phone use can be beneficial if it is integrated into course activities ( Wood, Mirza, & Shaw, 2018 ). For example, phone-based personal response systems (e.g., Kahoot, TopHat) have been shown to have positive effects on learning ( Ma, Steger, Doolittle, & Stewart, 2018 ). However, college students report spending the majority of time using cell phones for non-academic purposes ( Junco & Cotten, 2012 ), and “off-task” uses are common during classroom activities that integrate cell phones ( Wood, et al., 2018 ). Moreover, the more time students spend using technology while attempting to complete schoolwork, the lower their GPAs ( Junco & Cotten, 2012 ). Thus, while cell phones in class may sometimes enhance learning, “off task” use in the classroom may diminish these beneficial effects.

Evidence indicates that students are aware that cell phone use is dangerous to their grades, but yet persist in the activity compulsively. Burns and Lohenry (2010) reported that 53% of students admitted to texting in class. However, 85% of students considered cell phones to be distracting during class. Moreover, students are apparently aware that in-class cell phone use can be detrimental to their grades. Elder (2013) found that students reported expecting a decline in grades as a result of cell phone use. Nonetheless, many students persisted in using their phones in class, suggesting that cell phone use might be a compulsive activity. Students exhibiting less self-regulation are more likely to text in class, and have a hard time sustaining attention in class ( Wei, Wang, & Klausner, 2012 ). The compulsion to use cell phones has the potential to be a detriment to students' personal well being ( Roberts, Yaya, & Manolis, 2014 ).

If in-class cell-phone use constitutes a compulsion, might it be associated with anxiety? Indeed, survey research shows that students who use their cell phones often are more likely to have lower GPAs and report more anxiety ( Lepp et al., 2014 ). Social anxiety and poor self-esteem are also related to excessive cell phone use ( You, Zhang, Zhang, Xu, & Chen, 2019 ). In-class texting is associated with impulsivity and an inability to delay gratification ( Hayashi & Blessington, 2018 ). These results suggest that in-class cell phone use might be motivated by anxiety.

There is some evidence that cell phone use policies can mitigate the negative effects of cell phones in the classroom. Burns and Lohenry (2010) proposed five ways professors could combat the distraction of cell phone use in class. These proposed solutions included creating, implementing, and clearly communicating cell phone policies, as well as role modeling, reinforcing, and clearly communicating cell phone etiquette. Classroom policies on cell phone use vary widely and some policies are likely to be more effective than others. McDonald (2013) tested the efficacy of a restrictive cell phone use policy (cell phones banned in class) compared to no cell phone policy. On average, students in the no-policy courses suffered a decline in grades. However, Lancaster (2018) found no differences in student learning in classes featuring permissive and restrictive cell phone policies. Therefore, it is unclear whether and how cell phone policies affect student learning.

Berry and Westfall (2015) investigated students' perspectives of classroom cell phone policies. Students reported that the most punitive policies were also the most effective and the least punitive policies were the least effective. These results suggest that strict policies are needed to dissuade students from in-class cell phone use. However, cell phone policies might affect student evaluations of the class. Jackson (2013) reported that students feels annoyed when instructors ban the use of cell phones during class. However, Lancaster (2018) showed that students reported more positive evaluations of an instructor when the instructor used a restrictive cell phone policy compared to a permissive policy. Therefore, it is not entirely clear whether restrictive policies result in positive or negative student affect.

Our study examines the effects of a one-day intervention that varied cell phone policies in two introductory psychology course sections. One course section was given a lenient policy, while the other section was given a restrictive policy. We developed four hypotheses: First, we hypothesized that the class with the lenient policy would exhibit more cell phone use. Second, we expected that in-class cell phone use would predict lower quiz scores. Third, we expected participants with more anxiety to report more in-class cell phone use and lower GPAs. Finally, we expected students to self-report using their phones mostly for non-academic purposes.

Participants

We recruited a convenience sample of 73 students ( M age = 20.35, SD = 4.35; 35 female, 37 male) enrolled in two sections of an introductory psychology course at a public Midwestern Historically Black University (40 students were officially enrolled in each section). Our sample consisted of 47 African American students and 18 White students (8 students of other ethnicities). Students were observed and surveyed during class time. The Institutional Review Board reviewed and approved the study prior to data collection.

The two sections of the introductory course were randomly assigned to one of two groups: a restrictive cell phone policy or a lenient cell phone policy. In the restricted cell phone group, participants were explicitly told that cell phone use would be prohibited during the 50-minute lecture. Furthermore, instances of cell phone use detected by the professor would result in a deduction of two attendance points. In the restrictive condition, the professor made an attempt to record cell phone use while lecturing. This multitasking likely resulted in unrecorded instances of student cell phone use. In the lenient phone policy group, participants were told that phone use would not result in any deduction of points.

Both groups were presented the same lecture, in the same room (featuring theater-style seating), by the same professor, one hour apart. Prior to the assignment of conditions, there was no stated cell phone policy in either section. The manipulation took place approximately one month into the semester, on the same day for both groups. The manipulation of the lenient policy group preceded the restrictive group on that day. While students in the lenient policy group might have informed those in the restrictive group about the manipulation, that scenario is unlikely since the manipulation took place over two consecutive class hours with only a 10-minute transition between conditions.

Two observers attended the classes to record actual cell phone use during the 50-minute lectures. Students were told that the researchers were student teachers observing the techniques of the professor. Researchers sat in the back of the room and recorded all instances of phone use using a checklist.

At the end of the class period, students took a 10-question multiple-choice quiz over the lecture material and completed a survey. The survey measured demographics (e.g., gender, ethnicity), attitudes about cell phone use in class (e.g., “Students should be allowed to use cell phones in class;” 2 items; α = 0.74), academic motivation (“I outline specific goals for my study time;” 8 items; α = .83), tasks completed with cell phone during in-class phone use (5 tasks, see Table 1 ), and anxiety (e.g., “I worry too much about different things;” Spitzer, Williams, & Kroenke, 1999 ; 5 items; α =0.81). Apart from demographics, each question was followed by a 5-point Likert scale.

Self-Reported Typical Tasks Completed With Cell Phone

We expected the lenient policy group to use their phones significantly more than the restrictive policy group. Our observations indicated that both sections used their cell phones an approximately equal amount regardless of whether the cell phone policy was lenient (45 instances of in-class cell phone use) or restrictive (43 instances), Chi Square = 0.04, p = 0.83.

We predicted that the class with the lenient policy would have lower quiz scores. The quiz scores between the two groups did not differ significantly. The restrictive-policy group ( M = 5.44, SD = 2.11) had only slightly lower scores than the lenient-policy group ( M = 5.83, SD = 1.99), t (71) =0.81, p = 0.42. Both groups also reported similar academic motivation, t (70) = -0.67, p = 0.50, in-class cell phone use, t (64) = 1.65, p = 0.10, and anxiety, t (70) = 1.40, p = 0.17.

We anticipated that participants reporting more anxiety would report more in-class phone use. Contrary to what we expected, anxiety was not a predictor of in-class cell phone use, r (65) = -.15, p = 0.23. Predictably, academic motivation was significantly correlated with higher quiz scores, r (72) = -0.28, p = 0.02. Of note, students self-reported checking their phones an average of 6.92 times during a single 50-minute class period.

Students reported using their phones during class time for a variety of activities. While some students reported using their phones in class for academic purposes, it was more common for students to use their phones for entertainment and social media purposes (see Table 1 ).

Our results suggest that punitive in-class cell phone policies like ours are likely to be ineffective. Cell phone use was high in our samples, and was not affected by the introduction of a lenient or restrictive policy. In the restrictive policy condition, the professor was unable to monitor cell phone use effectively while teaching, which may have rendered the policy ineffective. One of the most influential factors affecting cell phone use is class size ( Tindell & Bohlander, 2012 ). With over 25 students, noticing individual instances of cell phone use might be impossible or overly distracting for a professor who is concentrating on the lesson. Being unaware of the extent of cell phone use, the faculty member might believe that his/her policies are effective. Berry and Westfall (2015) found that faculty self reported that almost all types of cell phone policies were effective, whereas students reported perceiving most cell phone policies as ineffective.

Perhaps stricter phone policies, such as making student phones inaccessible during class time, would be more likely to deter cell phone use ( McDonald, 2013 ). However, there is a risk that stricter phone policies could be detrimental to the learning environment by making students focus on hiding their phone use, causing them to further dissociate from the class experience. Another potential drawback is that students reportedly dislike strict policies ( Jackson, 2013 ). However, with cell phone use habits well established by the time students enter college, strong policies may be necessary to alter student behavior ( McDonald, 2013 ).

Students report having trouble not using their phones during class ( Roberts et al., 2014 ; Sunthilia, Ahmad, & Singh, 2016). Indeed, our data show consistently high cell phone use in both groups. Students using cell phones in class realize that the behavior has a negative impact on their grades, yet the activity seems difficult to control ( Roberts et al., 2014 ; Sunthilia et al., 2016). Compulsive cell phone use suggests an association with anxiety, in which a student might experience anxiety relief from engaging in phone use. However, our data did not show that anxiety was associated with cell phone use. Rather, the positive reinforcements (e.g., social connectivity) inherent in phone use might increase the behavior ( Puente & Balmori, 2007 ). Moreover, students may be unable to focus on the long-term rewards of paying attention in class (e.g., gaining knowledge, better test scores, and an eventual degree) and instead give in to the immediate temptation to use their phones. Perhaps delaying the gratification of phone use can be trained ( Murray, Theakston, & Wells, 2016 ). Interventions might focus on increasing self-regulation of cell phone use. Research suggests that individuals who have better delay of gratification skills also succeed better academically and socially throughout life ( Yang & Wang, 2007 ).

A potential solution to the problem of distracting cell phones could be for professors to use cell phones in the classroom in structured ways that promote learning. Finding educationally relevant ways for students to use their phones in class may alleviate the compulsory need to use phones for non-academic purposes. For example, phone-based personal response systems can be effectively used to quiz students on course material or to increase class participation ( Ma et al., 2018 ). Rogers (2009) suggests that for in-class cell phone use to be beneficial to students, guidelines and norms must be taught in middle and high school. Clear boundaries and enforceable consequences are imperative to the success of such an initiative ( Weinstock, 2010 ). Even so, problems may occur when students access non course-related sites during class time ( Madden, 2012 ). Indeed, our data suggests that students tend toward non-academic cell phone use in the classroom.

If punitive cell phone policies like ours are no better than the absence of a cell phone policy, the question remains whether there are any types of cell-phone policies that are effective. One possibility is to create a policy based on positive reinforcement, rather than punishment. A quasi-experiment by Katz and Lambert (2016) implemented a reward system for students who refrained from phone use during class. Students who handed in their phones at the beginning of class received one extra credit point toward their final grades. Katz and Lambert (2016) found that students handing in their phones showed better test scores, attendance, and semester GPA. Further research should investigate the topic of reinforcement-based cell phone policies.

Our study had several limitations. One major limitation was the short time frame of the policy manipulation. Students may need more than one class period to adapt to a professor's policy before making substantial behavior changes. Research should examine how long policies need to be in place before they show behavioral changes. A related limitation was the fact that the new policy was introduced midway though the semester. There may have been carry-over effects of the prior policy that affected our results. We do not have any means of knowing how seating arrangement or class size might have affected our results. Our observations of cell phone use only recorded number of instances of use, not duration of use. Checking the time on a cell phone for 1 second might be far less distracting than scrolling though Instagram for 10 minutes. Finally, our mostly African American sample may be different from other student samples insofar as cultural background might influence cell phone use patterns. For example, African Americans and Latinos are less likely to access the Internet on smart phones than other groups ( Fairlie, 2017 ). Therefore, it may be hard to generalize our findings to other college student samples.

Our study suggests that punitive methods aimed at banning cell phone use in class may be somewhat ineffective. Students are using their phones predominantly for entertainment and social media purposes, which may distract from class material and could result in lower grades. Pedagogical methods that utilize phones in class for educational purposes pose a number of logistical difficulties, including the persistent need to control phone use for “off-task” activities. Further research should continue to investigate how the beneficial aspects of cell phones might be maximized while minimizing distraction from teaching and learning. Other topics for future research include investigation of how class size, teaching style, and seating arrangement affect cell phone use. Finally, researchers should explore the question of whether policies should be tailored to various cultural, ethnic, or age groups to maximize their effectiveness.

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Banning mobile phones in schools: evidence from regional-level policies in Spain

Applied Economic Analysis

ISSN : 2632-7627

Article publication date: 25 January 2022

Issue publication date: 14 October 2022

The autonomous governments of two regions in Spain established mobile bans in schools as of the year 2015. Exploiting the across-region variation introduced by such a quasi-natural experiment, this study aims to perform a comparative-case analysis to investigate the impact of this non-spending-based policy on regional Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores in maths and sciences and bullying incidence.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors apply the synthetic control method and diff-in-diff estimation to compare the treated regions with the rest of regions in Spain before and after the intervention.

The results show noticeable reductions of bullying incidence among teenagers in the two treated regions. The authors also find positive and significant effects of this policy on the PISA scores of the Galicia region that are equivalent to 0.6–0.8 years of learning in maths and around 0.72 to near one year of learning in sciences.

Originality/value

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first empirical study analysing the impact of mobile phone bans in schools on bullying cases, exploiting variation across regions (or other units), years and age intervals. Besides, the scarce formal evidence that exists on the consequences of the mobile phones use in students’ academic achievement comes from a micro perspective, while the paper serves as one more piece of evidence from a macro perspective.

• School bullying
• Comparative-case studies
• Maths and sciences skills
• Regional-level policies

Beneito, P. and Vicente-Chirivella, Ó. (2022), "Banning mobile phones in schools: evidence from regional-level policies in Spain", Applied Economic Analysis , Vol. 30 No. 90, pp. 153-175. https://doi.org/10.1108/AEA-05-2021-0112

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2022, Pilar Beneito and Óscar Vicente-Chirivella.

Published in Applied Economic Analysis . Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence maybe seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

1. Introduction

The question of whether or not to ban mobile phones’ usage in schools is on the current agendas of education policy mandates and has generated recent debates in many countries [ 1 ]. Beyond particular policies at the individual school level, governments in some countries or some states/regions banned mobile phones in schools in recent years. For instance, the Israeli Ministry of Education decided to ban mobile phones during the school day in 2016. In France, the policy came into effect during the beginning of the 2018–2019 school year and impacted students over 15. In 2019, four states in Australia banned smartphones for students up to 18 years. Instead, in 2015 the Mayor of New York removed a 10-year ban of phones in schools, claiming that abolition could decrease inequality ( Allen, 2015 ). Governments pursue two main goals with this type of policy intervention: improving academic performance and reducing bullying, which are precisely the impacts that we address in this paper.

An effective control of the use of new mobile technologies made by students at schools can constitute a new policy tool to complement resource-based interventions by governments. This might become specially interesting if, as some authors have pointed out, the room for resource inputs to affect human capital formation can be of limited scope in some settings. In this line, Woessmann (2016) provides evidence that students in a wide set of countries overperform students in the USA while spending considerably less on schools per student ( OECD, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2013 ). This author concludes that a wide range of additional factors, including institutional features of school systems, may entail major implications for the effectiveness of education investments.

In this paper, we provide regional-level evidence of the impact of a non-spending-based policy intervention directly aimed at enhancing academic outcomes and, simultaneously, students’ social behavior. In particular, we investigate the impact of banning mobile phones in schools on students’ academic achievement and school bullying incidence. To this end, we use as comparative case studies two regions in Spain (Galicia and Castilla La Mancha, CLM henceforth) whose regional governments passed laws to ban mobile phones in primary and secondary educational centers towards the end of the year 2014 (CLM) and beginning of the year 2015 (Galicia). In the rest of Spanish regions other than Galicia and CLM, the use of mobile phones by students in schools is not regulated [ 2 ].

The mentioned interventions in Galicia and CLM constitute a quasi-natural experiment that allows us to take the case of Spain and their regions as an excellent lab for the analysis of this highly debated policy. One advantage of using regional-level data within a country is that it permits us to examine differences among units that are comparable in some fundamental institutional and cultural traits. That is, it avoids the huge unobserved country heterogeneity affecting cross-country analysis ( Di Liberto, 2008 ; and Gennaioli et al. , 2013 ). Galicia and, particularly so, CLM are regions with wealth levels below the Spanish average (over the analyzed period, Galicia is the 9th and CLM is the 14th out of the 17 Spanish regions in the ranking of real income per capita). Hence, the analysis of a policy intervention that could impact educational development, while not based on large investments of economic resources, entails great interest in the case of disadvantaged regions.

To conduct the analysis, we construct a region-level panel data for our outcome variables of interest as well as for several regional-year control variables using official data sources for the 17-Spanish regions before and after the mobile phone bans (with the exceptions that we will comment below). We compare the regions where the policy was implemented (the treated regions, henceforth) with the rest of regions in Spain before and after the intervention took place.

For the analysis of academic outcomes, we use the scores in maths and sciences obtained by 15-year-old Spanish students in the five The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) installments conducted from 2006 to 2018 (every three years). The PISA scores [international testing entered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2000] have the advantage of their international comparability and are aimed at evaluating competencies and skills rather than locally designed academic goals. In addition, the focus on middle-school students is of special interest in the case of Spain, given the importance of secondary education in the Spanish labor market ( López-Bazo and Moreno, 2012 ).

As participation in the PISA installments is not mandatory, the CLM region did not participate neither in 2006 nor in 2012, which poses us problems for the analysis of the pre-intervention trends in the academic achievement of students in this region. Fortunately, the data for the Galicia region is complete. Taking advantage of this, we apply both the synthetic control method (SCM, henceforth, Abadie and Gardeazábal, 2003 ; Abadie et al. , 2010 ) and differences-in-differences (DID) regression analysis (DID, henceforth) to evaluate the impact of the mobile phones ban on students’ PISA scores in this region. In the case of the CLM region, we will present below some estimates of the effect of interest using DID regressions, though we take with special caution these results due to the mentioned data limitations.

For the analysis of bullying, we apply DID regression to both Galicia and CLM. The outcome variables are, in this case, officially reported cases for every 10,000 school students in three age intervals (covering from 6 to 17 years old), spanning over the period 2012–2017. This information, by region and year, was requested to the Spanish police forces and made public by the Spanish Ministry of Education in 2018, following a specific demand of information in this regard made by a member of the parliament. Thus, the region-year-age level data on bullying used in this paper is quite unique. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical study exploiting variation across regions (or other units), years and age intervals on bullying cases.

There exists scarce formal evidence on the consequences of the mobile phone use in students’ academic achievement. This is especially important on primary and secondary education since it is at this age when children initiate the use of these devices, and also where the existing evidence is particularly scarce [ 3 ]. The use of mobile devices is not necessarily detrimental for education when correctly designed. For example, the use of certain Apps could make children more involved in their learning process and increase the enjoyment from studying. In addition, the immediate access to an infinite source of information can complement instruction received at schools and improve the learning process of students ( Milrad, 2003 ). Furthermore, students can rapidly share information not only with other students but also with teachers, which could lead to a more efficient studying and collaboration ( Chen and Ji, 2015 ; Lepp et al. , 2015 ).

Positive effects on academic achievement can also come from potential complementarities between the use of mobile phones and the development of other technological competencies on the part of students, provided that the latter enhances academic outcomes. In this regard, our paper is also related to the literature on the impact of technology on students’ outcomes. Results from this literature, however, are far from conclusive [ 4 ]. Some results seem to indicate that what actually matters is not the technology on its own but rather the structured or unstructured use of a particular technology. For instance, Barrow et al. (2009) find that students randomly assigned to computer-aided instruction using an algebra program largely improve on algebra test scores compared to the students receiving traditional instruction. Also, Muralidharan et al. (2019) show that well-designed, technology-aided instruction programs sharply improve test scores in middle-school grades [ 5 ]. Finally, Fryer (2013) set an experiment where a treated group of students were provided with free mobile phones where they received daily information about human capital and future outcomes, while the control group did not receive this information. Results show that although students in the treated group did not improve attendance, behavioral incidents or test scores, they reported being more focused and working harder in school. Cho et al. (2018) offer a meta-analysis looking at the effect of mobile devices on student achievement in language learning in primary, secondary and post-secondary education. They find a positive effect of using mobile devices on language acquisition and language-learning achievement and, thus, conclude that the use of mobile devices could facilitate language learning.

However, even if mobile phones are used to structured activities, allowing them in schools opens the door to be used for recreational purposes as well, thus generating distraction. In fact, according to research in computer science and educational studies, the detrimental effects of mobile phones in schools are explained because multi-tasking or task-switching decrease learning ( Jacobsen and Forste, 2011 ; Junco and Cotten , 2011, 2012 ; Rosen et al. , 2013 ; Wood et al. , 2012 ). For example, notifications on the smartphone are a constant distraction limiting students’ attention during class and/or study time ( Junco and Cotten, 2012 ). Besides, the desire to continuously interact with the rest of the world may lead to a level of concentration that is lower than needed to achieve a good study performance ( Chen and Yan, 2016 ) [ 6 ]. Finally, unmotivated students have a great temptation at their fingertips to switch off from the lesson and play games, surfing the internet or use social networks ( Hawi and Samaha, 2016 ). Some experimental papers present additional evidence pointing in this direction ( Wood et al. , 2012 ; Kuznekoff and Titsworth, 2013 ; Levine et al. , 2013 ; Amez and Baert, 2020 , for a survey of papers published in this field).

Recent direct evidence on the causal effects of banning mobile phones policies on academic outcomes are provided by Beland and Murphy (2016) , Kessel et al. (2020) and Abrahamsson (2020) . Beland and Murphy (2016) investigate the impact of banning mobile phone use in schools on student academic results using a sample of 91 schools in four English cities. In particular, they analyze the gains in test scores across and within schools before and after mobile phones bans were introduced, and find positive effects of banning the use of mobile phones on such academic results. Kessel et al. (2020) replicate the same study with data for Sweden but, contrary to Beland and Murphy (2016) , do not find any significant effect of the ban on students’ academic performance. Abrahamsson (2020) studies the effect of banning smartphones in the classroom on students’ educational outcomes in Norwegian middle schools, and shows that the banning policies significantly increased girls’ grade point average and increased their likelihood of attending an academic high school track. Interestingly, the magnitude of her estimates is larger among low-ability students and students from low socioeconomic backgrounds.

Research on the relationship between the use of mobile phones in schools and bullying is even scarcer. A possible explanation for this lack of studies is the difficulty in obtaining reliable data on bullying cases. The link between mobile phones in schools and bullying is very intuitive: given that cyberbullying already represents 20% of bullying cases ( Cook, 2020 ) and that smartphones are one of the main conduits for cyberbullying among children ( Adams, 2019 ), the removal of the instrument should be expected to influence the number of bullying cases. In spite of the scarcity of research on this topic, the analysis of the possible actions that may control bullying is of primary importance, given the severe and long-term consequences for those suffering it as a child or teenager in the form of psychological and emotional health, education and future earnings ( Drydakis, 2014 ). To the best of the authors knowledge, the paper by Abrahamsson (2020) is the unique reference in the literature that carries out a causal analysis of the link between banning mobile phones at schools and bullying. This author finds that banning mobiles phones have the potential to reduce school bullying among middle-school students. Further, and interestingly enough, she finds that the policy is effective only when it is implemented as a clear prohibition to bring the device (mobile phone) into school.

As mentioned before, other studies have already looked at the effect of banning mobile phones in schools on student achievements using micro data. Unfortunately, we do not have data at such a disaggregated level. However, with the data we have and the techniques we use in our analysis, we can still provide suggestive evidence on whether a regional-level policy can have effects on our variables of interest. Therefore, one of the contributions of our paper is offering a new perspective by looking at differences between regions rather than differences across schools and students. By using the PISA assessments, which are homogenous across regions, we avoid all the possible concerns about different exams in different schools and the self-selection of students in certain schools. One more novelty of our study is that we are able to check the bullying effects in different age groups: under-12, 12–14 and from 15–17 years old. Given that among children under 12 years old the use of mobile phones is not extended yet in Spain, we do not expect significant results for the under-12 group. Thus, results for this age group may serve as a placebo check in our analysis below [ 7 ].

Thus, our paper contributes by highlighting the potential effects of a non-spending-based policy on the educational attainment of middle-school students. In addition, our analysis also addresses the potential effects of these policies in enhancing the school social environment, an indirect though potentially relevant factor affecting educational outcomes. The policy analyzed in this paper is a timely issue of primary relevance looking ahead on a future where technology will dominate the workplace, and everything will be connected and data-driven.

To anticipate our results, we find that, after less than three years since the mobile phones ban was in force (from 2015 to 2017), students’ PISA scores in Galicia improved by around 10 points in maths and 12 points in sciences as compared to a synthetic Galicia that had followed exactly the same trend in these scores before the intervention. Following Woessmann (2016) , these estimated effects are equivalent to 0.6–0.8 years of learning in maths and around 0.72 to near one year of learning in sciences. Jointly with this, bullying incidence fell by around 9.5% to 18% over its pre-intervention levels among teenagers in the treated regions.

It is worth mentioning that the prohibition policy analyzed here was not a categorical prohibition since it allowed devices to be used inside the schools as a learning tool for educational purposes. Could it be the case that Galicia and CLM decided to use the devices in this direction to a larger extent since the year 2015? According to the INE [ 8 ], this does not seem to have been the case: the percentage of secondary schools that allowed students to use mobile devices with educational purposes during 2016/2017 (first year with available information) were around 33% and 36% for Galicia and CLM, respectively, while the national average was 34%. Unfortunately, we do not have information on whether these schools ended up using mobile phones with educational purposes or not or to what extent.

Even if the policy was not a categorical prohibition, it certainly provides the legal coverage for centers and instructors to effectively limit students’ misbehaviors in educational centers. From this perspective, it seems sensible to assume that the percentage of educational centers/teachers controlling the use of mobile phones have been clearly higher in the regions with and after the policy. In any case, our estimates have to be framed within the limitation of the available information, and taken not as a response to the prohibition of mobile phones per se but, instead, to the enforcement of using mobile phones for learning purposes only.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides a description of the materials and methods used in this paper. Section 3 presents the results, and finally, Section 4 concludes and discusses our main results.

2. Data and methods

2.1 region-year panel data.

Spain is administratively organized in 17 regions (NUTS-2 regions, in the Eurostat’s classification, referred to as “Comunidades Autónomas” in Spain). The regional governments are autonomous, among other aspects, to decide upon the regulation and administration of education in all its extension, levels and grades [ 9 ]. On this base, two Spanish Regional Governments (CLM and Galicia) passed laws to ban in all the educational centers of primary and secondary stages the use of mobile phones by students as of 2015 [ 10 ]. In the rest of the regions, the use of mobile phones is unregulated, in most of the cases allowing each school to decide upon the use of mobile phones [ 11 ]. To conduct the analysis, we create a region-level panel using official sources of data for all the 17-Spanish regions before and after the mobile phones-ban, with the exceptions that we comment below. We set the year 2015 as the first year where the intervention could have had an effect on our outcome variables [ 12 ].

For the analysis of academic outcomes, we use the scores obtained by Spanish school students in the PISA installments from 2006 to 2018 [ 13 ]. We use in total five PISA assessments, corresponding to years 2006, 2009, 2012, 2015 and 2018. We attribute the scoring of every PISA assessment to the academic achievement of students developed up to the previous year. For instance, the results of PISA-2018 are considered to measure the academic competencies acquired by students up to the year 2017 (included). In accordance with this, we lag the PISA scores of a given call one year. After this, we construct a yearly time series of PISA scores interpolating the scores from one PISA wave to the next, under the assumption that the improvement or the decline in academic competencies evaluated by PISA occurs gradually between each pair of consecutive assessments [ 14 ]. We finally use in the analysis the series of constructed scores spanning 2006–2017. Unfortunately, the CLM region did not participate in two out of the five PISA installments (2006 and 2012), so that the series of academic results constructed for this region present limitations when it comes to track their temporal evolution. Thus, we will take with special caution the analysis of academic results in the case of the CLM region [ 15 ].

For the analysis of bullying, we use the information provided by the Spanish Ministry of Education in 2018 about officially reported cases of school bullying from 2012 to 2017. This data was requested in 2018 by the Spanish Ministry of Education to the Spanish national and local police forces to respond a specific query about this social problem made in the parliament [ 16 ]. The regions of Cataluña and País Vasco did not report this information, and, for this reason, these two regions are not included in our analysis of bullying. The cases were reported separately for four age intervals, namely, school students 6–8, 9–11, 12–14 and 15–17 years-old. We define three age groups for our analysis below: on the one hand, primary schools students (under-12 years old), and, on the other hand, secondary school students, distinguishing in this case the two age groups mentioned. For each of these age intervals, we construct the number of cases for every 10,000 school students of that age [ 17 ].

Finally, we construct three additional covariates, with across region and yearly variation, to be used in the SCM and DID estimation. The first variable is the percentage of children over 10 owning a mobile phone [ 18 ]. This variable aims at capturing the extent to which the use of mobile phones, in or out of schools, is generalized among the children of a region and year. Second, we construct series of public real spending (excluding the financial component [ 19 ]) on education in the primary and secondary stages of education per school-student [ 20 ]. This variable tries to capture changes in academic results or bullying that might respond to differences in the regional level of investments in education. Finally, we also construct series of households’ per capita real disposable income for each region-year [ 21 ]. Nominal variables are deflated using CPI indexes at the region-year level.

Figure 1 and Table 1 show the relative standing of the two treated regions, Galicia and CLM, in the Spanish economy in terms of households’ real income per capita, public spending per student on education by region and percentages of children and adolescents who use mobile phones. The period represented in the maps spans 2012–2017. In Figure 1 , the regions have been classified into four quartiles of the distribution of the variable in the heading of each map. Sorting income in decreasing order, the region of CLM lies within the fourth quartile, that is, among the poorest Spanish regions, while Galicia lies within the third quartile in this ranking. Further, as can be seen in Table 1 , income levels have remained quite stable both in the treated and in the untreated regions, and also over the six years period around the implementation of the policy (2012–2017).

In terms of educational public spending, CLM also lies within the last quartile, while Galicia seems to have made a considerable effort during this period in terms of educational spending on primary and secondary education, given that the region is in the first quartile in terms of this type of spending per student. It is unlikely that the income levels of Galicia unless they appreciably start increasing, could sustain in time such levels of educational public spending. Table 1 shows that these levels of Galician public spending on primary and secondary education have increased over the period as much as in the rest of regions in Spain. In any case, to reassure that these differences do not confound our results of interest, we partial out the effect of public educational spending in our estimations below.

Finally, and as regard the use of mobile phones in the regions, the main conclusion we draw is that contrary to what could be expected, income not always correlates positively with mobile phones’ usage. For instance, the region of Extremadura (on the South-West limiting with Portugal) is among the poorest regions in Spain while also among the regions with the most intense usage of mobile phones. The treated regions, Galicia and CLM, lie within the second quartile in this classification. Table 1 further shows that these percentages have been increasing in time and, apparently, at comparable rates in all the Spanish regions.

Next, Figures 2 and 3 display the sample distribution across regions of our two outcomes of interest, namely, PISA scores and bullying incidence, before and after the mobile phones ban. The PISA scale is standardized to have a mean of 500 and a standard deviation, SD, of 100 among all students in OECD countries (this standardization was done in 2003 in maths and in 2006 in sciences). Figure 2 shows that, as compared to previous PISA installments (from 2006 to 2015), the scores obtained by Spanish students in PISA-2018 remained quite stable on average in maths, while in science the average Spanish score diminished by around five points (in our sample, average scores changed from 488.6 to 487.2 in maths and from 494.7 to 489.8 in sciences, before and after the year 2015, respectively). Galicia and CLM are among the regions that improved their position in the Spanish regional ranking with respect to their scores in previous PISA installments.

Figure 3 displays, on the left, the statistics for primary school students under-12 years old and, on the right, those corresponding to children and teenagers who are mobile phones users (12–17 years old). A first observation is that, as expected, reported cases of bullying are much less frequent among the smaller children. In our data, average bullying incidence is 10 times smaller among under-12 children than among 12–17 years old teenagers. Second, we observe in both cases that the officially reported cases of bullying remained quite stable over the period of analysis; if anything, they slightly increased in the under-12 group (averages of 0.38 before 2015 and 0.48 after 2015 for the under-12 group; averages of 3.90 and 3.93 for the older groups; vertical lines in the graphs indicate the sample averages). The right-hand side panel also shows that both Galicia and CLM overpassed by more the average line before 2015 than after that year.

At this descriptive level, however, we cannot discern to what extent the observed changes can be attributed to the mobile phones ban. Differences in (out of school) mobile phone use among children across regions and over time, in income levels or in educational expenditures, for instance, are not controlled in the figures. In the next section, we describe the empirical strategy that we follow to identify the impact of the mobile phones ban.

2.2 Synthetic control method

For the analysis of academic outcomes, we focus specially in the case of Galicia, for which we count on a complete time series of observations (PISA scores in maths and sciences from 2006 to 2017). Our identification strategy relies primarily on the application of the SCM ( Abadie and Gardeazábal, 2003 ; Abadie et al. , 2010 ). The SCM is a statistical technique that has been specially designed to estimate the effects of events or policy interventions that take place at the aggregate level and affect to a small number of large units, such as cities, regions or countries. Thus, it constitutes one of the causal-identifying methods best suited to be applied to our sample data of regions [ 22 ].

The idea behind the SCM strategy is that the effect of an intervention can be measured through a comparison between the evolution of the outcome variable of interest in the unit affected by the policy intervention and a group of units similar to the treated unit that have not been treated. The main requirement to apply this methodology is that the evolution of the outcome variable for treated and untreated units can be properly tracked during the pre-intervention period. Two of the advantages of this methodology are, first, that it only requires data on an aggregate level ( Abadie et al. , 2010 ) and, second, that it solves the arbitrariness in the choice of the control units typically affecting comparative-case studies. Instead, the SCM conducts a formalized data-driven procedure that constructs a weighted combination of a small number of unaffected units, taken from the set of potential controls or donor pool, as the most appropriate unit of comparison [ 23 ].

In the SCM, the counterfactual outcome Y i t N is estimated as the outcome corresponding to that synthetic unit. More formally, considering ( J + 1) regions, with ( J = 1) being the treated one, the synthetic control is constructed from a ( J × 1) vector of weights, W = ( w 2 , […], w J +1 )’ that allows us to define the estimators for Y i t N and for the effect on the treated unit τ it as follows: (1) Y j t N = ∑ j = 2 J + 1 ω j t Y j t (2) τ 1 t ^ = Y j t N ^ − ∑ j = 2 J + 1 ω j t Y j t where the weights are restricted to be non-negative and to sum to one.

To apply the SCM, we need a set of k potential predictors of the pre-intervention outcome trends. As such predictors, we use past values of the own outcome of interest plus the covariates defined above (percentage of children using mobile phones, public spending on education and disposable real income per capita). The method uses a weighting-matrix, V , that contains the relative importance of each of the k predictors in constructing the synthetic control. The main challenge of the method is how to find the optimal weighting matrices W and V . We follow Abadie et al. (2010) , who propose choosing the V that minimizes the root mean squared prediction error (RMSPE) of the pre-intervention outcome between the treated unit and the control unit. Then, W , which is a function of V , is picked to minimize the RMSPE of the predictor variables for a given V .

Below, after the SCM estimation and to evaluate the significance of our estimates, we report standardized p -values constructed from the distribution of placebo or permutation tests following Abadie et al. (2010) . This is done by estimating the same model on each untreated unit with the same intervention years and period and removing the actual treated unit from the potential donor pool of these other units. These are non-parametric exact tests, which have the advantage of not imposing any distribution on the errors. If the effect of the intervention on the treated unit is significant (not observed by chance), we should observe that the probability of finding comparable estimated effects in other units is very low ( Galiani and Quistorff, 2017 , for further details).

Unfortunately, the available data for CLM does not allow us to trace out a fully reliable series of PISA assessments since students of this region did not participate in the PISA installments of the years 2006 and 2012. This prevents us from making a reliable pre-trend analysis for the CLM case. Thus, we do not apply the SCM to this case, although we will provide some evidence based on a DID regression for this region.

2.3 Difference-in-differences analysis

After the SCM, we apply DID analysis to the PISA scores of Galicia for the sake of comparison with the SCM and to the PISA scores of CLM. In the case of the bullying data, where the pre-sample period is not long enough to apply the SCM, we also conduct DID estimation.

The DID equation can be written as follows: (3) Y i t = α + βPos t t × D i + γ x i t + δ i + τ t + u i t where subscripts i and t denote the region and year, respectively. The dependent variable, Y it , is our outcome of interest in each case, either students’ PISA scores or officially reported cases of bullying. Post t is a dummy-step variable taking on value 1 for the year of implementation and subsequent years (2015–2017); D i is a dummy variable for the treated region, capturing time-constant differences between it and the rest of regions if any. Vector X it contains three covariates, namely, the percentage of mobile phone usage by children in the region-year, real public spending on education in primary and secondary education and region-year per capita real disposable income. Finally, δ i stand for region-fixed effects (thus absorbing time-constant differences between the treated region and the rest of regions), τ t is a full set of year dummies and u it stands for the iid error of the model. In equation (3) , once region-level specific differences, common year effects and other region-year differences in covariates have been controlled for, parameter β identifies the treatment effect.

In the estimation below, we also show the results for an extended specification of equation (3) where we add a term pre t −1 × D i : (4) Y i t = α + β 0 pr e t − 1 × D i + β 1 Post t × D i + γx it + δ i + τ t + u it

The added term is the product of a dummy variable taking on the value 1 for some pre-intervention years times the dummy of the treated regions. In particular, we define pre t −1 as a dummy variable taking the value 1 for years 2012–2014 in our analysis of the PISA scores (and 0 otherwise), and a dummy variable taking the value 1 for the year 2014 in our analysis of bullying (and 0 otherwise). This term serves us to rule out the possibility that the differences between the treated and the control regions started to appear prior to the ban. In other words, the estimate of β 0 is expected to be non-significant for the DID estimation to be a valid identification strategy.

The equations above are estimated for Galicia and CLM separately, and in the analysis of bullying, we further estimate the model for the three mentioned age intervals: under-12, 12-14 and 15-17 years old school students.

3.1 Impacts on academic performance

In Table 2 and Figure 4 , we display the results for the SCM applied to Galicia. As already mentioned, the SCM provides a systematic data-driven procedure to create the (weighted) combination of regions that best resembles the actual Galicia before the implementation of the mobile phones ban. The SCM constructs the synthetic Galicia for PISA results on maths as a combination of Navarra (41.2%), Canarias (21.6%), La Rioja (14.4%), Extremadura (12.8%) and Cataluña (10%); for the PISA results in sciences, it is a combination of Castilla–León (79%), Islas Baleares (17%) Cataluña (3%) and Madrid (1%). All the other regions in the donor pool were assigned zero weights. The SCM estimation exhibits then sparcity in the choice of regions to construct the counterfactual ( Abadie, 2021 ), and also, as can be seen at the bottom of Table 2 , a close match between the pre- and post-intervention values of the predictors and low pre-intervention prediction error (root of the mean square prediction error, RMSPE, of around 0.4 for outcome variables that have average values of around 490).

Figure 4 permits us to visualize the almost perfect fit between the treated unit (Galicia) and its synthetic counterpart in the pre-intervention period. However, after the ban, there is a positive gap in favor of the Galicia region in both PISA indicators. In maths, this positive gap seems to respond to a combination of increasing scores in the case of Galicia and somewhat decreasing scores in the synthetic Galicia (though these latter scores do not fall below the pre-trend average values). In the case of sciences, the decline in the PISA results exhibited in the synthetic Galicia is more noticeable. This decline in Spanish students’ PISA scores in the past years, and particularly in the 2018-call, has been explicitly highlighted ( Stegmann, 2019 ). Further, this trend does not seem to be exclusive of the Spanish case. As documented by Rowley et al. (2019) and contrary to expectations –in authors’ words–, few countries significantly increased their PISA scores in recent years, and in many of the cases, the change is indeed negative. If we had to think on a global common phenomenon affecting young teenagers, the outbreak of the use of mobile phones would be a candidate. Further, in the standard DID estimation applied to the PISA data that we offer below, we find that regions with a higher percentage of teenagers’ mobile phones users have experienced, other things equal, a larger and significant decline on PISA results in the past years. Thus, one of the plausible explanations for the observed academic decline could be the intensification in the use of mobile phones among the youngest and the distraction that they introduce in their learning time. It follows that the control of their usage in school time might have allowed the treated region to escape from such declining trend.

The estimated effects are of an order of magnitude of around 10.7 and 12.7 points on maths and sciences, respectively, in the year 2017 (when the outcome takes the value of the PISA assessment of 2018). In addition, the p -values derived from the placebo tests in the SCM analysis indicate that for no other region, the SCM finds comparable results to the ones obtained for the treated region. Given that the average of PISA scores for Spanish students in maths and sciences are around 10–12 points below the international average of 500, the magnitude of the estimated effects would imply catching up with the OECD mean in a relatively short period of time. To evaluate further the magnitude of these effects, we can consider that, as a rule of thumb, the average student learning in a year is between one-quarter and one-third of a SD of the PISA scale, that is, around 25–30 points on the scale ( Woessmann, 2016 ). According to this, our estimated effects are equivalent to 0.6–0.8 years of learning in maths and around 0.72 to near one year of learning in sciences. On top of that, the economic consequences of these improvements are potentially very relevant. According to the OECD Report-2010 on the long-run impact of improving PISA outcomes ( Hanushek and Woessmann, 2010 ), a modest goal of having all OECD countries boost their average PISA scores by 25 points over the next 20 years would imply an aggregate gain of OECD gross domestic product (GDP) of US$115tn over the lifetime of the generation born in 2010 (p. 8).

Next, Table 3 displays the estimation results of the DID methodology both for Galicia and for CLM. For the sake of brevity, we only present, in this case, the results corresponding to specification (4). All columns in Table 3 include the full set of covariates also used above, namely, the share of children who have a mobile phone in the region-year, educational public spending and per capita real disposable income of the region-year. A first observation for the Galicia region, Columns (1) and (2), is that there is no evidence of pre-treatment differences in the PISA scores. That is, prior to the mobile phones ban, Galicia did not display any significant difference in their students’ results in the PISA assessments with respect to the rest of the regions in Spain. However, on average, over the after-ban period, the academic results in maths increased by more than 6 points in maths and by more than 8 points in sciences. These are improvements of around 0.5 times the standard deviation of the scores for all regions-years prior to the treatment, and more than four times and three times, respectively, the standard deviation of this region’ results from 2006 to 2015. The estimated magnitude of the effects, which are average estimates over the three-year period after the ban, are broadly comparable to those obtained with the SCM: if we average our SCM estimates in Table 2 over the three years post-intervention, we would obtain values of around 7.01 and 8.2 for maths and sciences, respectively. Thus, our results are broadly robust across the two estimation methods.

The results for the CLM region are less conclusive. On the one hand, we estimate positive post-ban effects in both maths and sciences, what would be suggesting some improvement in academic results from 2015 to 2018. However, the estimated effects do not render statistical significance in the case of maths, and the pre-intervention dummy turns out to be statistically significant both in maths and in sciences. Thus, we cannot discern which part of the observed changes does not respond really to a changing trend already initiated before the policy. In any case, the pre-trend dummy for CLM (with PISA scores not available for 2012) does not capture the change in 2015 over 2012 but over six years before, the year 2009. If scores had been stable between 2012 and 2015, no concern would arise on the estimated treatment effect, but we cannot observe this. Our conclusion is that, although the data for CLM also suggest positive effects of the policy, these should be interpreted with caution due to the data limitations.

Interestingly enough, and as mentioned above, the results also suggest that, beyond the in-school use of mobile phones, a higher percentage of children using mobile phones in the region is negatively associated to their academic results. This result would be pointing towards a negative impact of mobile phone use on academic results, which have implications for further advances on academic achievement given the rising worldwide trends in such use by youngsters. On the other hand, our results point out to a positive impact of educational public spending on the academic performance of students in the PISA assessments on maths. Once all these controls are included in the regressions, no significant effects are found for the region-year levels of per capita real disposable income.

3.2 Impacts on bullying

Tables 4 and 5 display the estimated impacts of the mobile phone ban on officially reported cases of bullying for Galicia and CLM, respectively. For both treated regions, we show the impact for each age interval. A first result to notice is that for the under-12 years-old interval, we find no significant treatment effects in neither case. Given that the use of mobile phones is not generalized among children under 12, we can, in fact, take these results as placebo or falsification checks (the mobile phones ban had not any impact on non-mobile phones users). For school students 12–14 and 15–17 years old the picture is different. In these cases, and both taking as case study either Galicia or CLM, the results point to a reduction in bullying after the mobile phones ban. Taking into account the pre-ban average values of bullying in each age interval, the estimated impacts would account for significant reductions of around 15% to 18% among 12–14 years old students for Galicia and CLM, respectively, and by around 18% to 9.5% among 15–17 years old teenagers for Galicia and CLM, respectively.

The pre-trend effects are not statistically significant in any of the age intervals, not even of the same sign that the treatment estimated effect in the two older age intervals. Thus, the estimated effects cannot be attributed to differences between the treated and the control regions already initiated prior to the treatment.

In the bottom part of Tables 4 and 5 , we further display the results of a series of placebo checks. We estimate the same model on each untreated unit (13 regions) with the same intervention year and pre- and post-periods, and removing the actual treated unit from the control group. In the table, we report the number of regions other than the treated region for which we estimate a negative and significant treatment effect with no significant estimates for the term pre t −1 × D i . Only in 1 out of the 13 cases we obtain a negative and significant effect post-intervention. Then, this would point to a probability of 0.076 of finding by chance a comparable result [ 24 ]. In addition, the region that turns out to show a significant effect is a different one in each of the age intervals, that is, no region other than the treated ones show significant effects in the two age intervals for which we find them. This suggests that the (scarce) findings in the placebo analysis are more likely to have been found by chance than the estimated effects for Galicia and CLM. Due to the short length of the estimation sample, our DID results here should be taken with caution as suggestive evidence, with further investigation in this issue needed [ 25 ].

4. Conclusions

Our paper highlights the potential effects of a regional-level non-spending-based policy on a fundamental driver of development, such as the skills in maths and sciences of middle-school students. Our analysis also addresses the potential effects of these policies on bullying incidence, a phenomenon of increasing interest that affects not only educational outcomes but also the social environment among teenagers. The study is focused on two low-wealth regions, which have more limited opportunities to rely on large and sustained levels of educational spending. Alternative policy interventions, affecting complementary aspects of the educational system such as the policy analyzed here, are thus of particular interest in these cases.

The implementation of this policy in the two mentioned regions in 2015 constitutes a quasi-natural experiment that we exploit to conduct a comparative-case analysis based on the SCM and DID regressions. In particular, we have compared regional PISA scores in maths and sciences and officially reported cases of bullying in the treated and the untreated regions before and after the policy took place. We find that, during the less than three years that the mobile phones ban was in force (from 2015 to 2017), students’ scores in Galicia improved by around 10 points in maths and 12 points in sciences as compared to a synthetic Galicia that had followed exactly the same trend in these scores before the intervention. We additionally find that bullying incidence fell by around 15% to 18% among 12–14 years old students for Galicia and CLM, respectively, and by around 18% to 9.5% among 15–17 years old teenagers for Galicia and CLM, respectively.

Our estimated effects in terms of PISA scores for Galicia are equivalent to 0.6–0.8 years of learning in maths and around 0.72 to near one year of learning in sciences, following Woessmann (2016) . The economic consequences of these improvements are potentially very relevant. According to simulations in the OECD Report-2010 on the high costs of low academic performance ( Hanushek and Woessmann, 2010 ), improvements in PISA scores would translate into long-run growth of economies with “implications for the OECD countries as a whole (that) are dramatic” (p. 29).

The policy analyzed in this paper is a timely issue of primary relevance looking ahead on a future where technology will dominate the workplace and everything will be connected and data-driven. This type of policy, as well as similar interventions aimed at reorienting and enhancing the use that the youngest make of the new technologies become a valuable tool that should be evaluated by countries and regions as a mean to contribute to their growth and development.

Although our results are robust to different interpolation strategies in the PISA data series, to changes in the estimation method (SCM or DID) and all they pass a wide set of placebo checks, [ 26 ] there are some limitations in the paper that advise us to interpret our findings as suggestive evidence. The first refers to the aggregate nature of the data and, in part as a consequence of this, the modest size of the data samples used in estimation. Thus, replicating this work with longer series of data or finer regional disaggregation would be of most interest for future research. The second derives from the fact that the regulation is not a categorical prohibition of mobile phones in schools but, instead, it gives flexibility to the institutions that want to use mobile phones as a learning tool only. Unfortunately, we lack information on the extent to which schools in the treated regions intensified the use of mobile phones as a learning tool after the policy intervention. Hence, the achievement gains found in this paper should be understood not as much as a result of the prohibition of mobile phones per se but as a result of the enforcement of using mobile phones for learning purposes only. Even with these limitations, our findings are suggestive of the potential beneficial effects of such a cheap policy.

Households’ income, public spending on education and percentage of mobile users among children and adolescents

PISA Scores in maths and sciences from 2006 to 2018

Cases of bullying per 10,000 individuals in each age-interval

Synthetic control method results for PISA assessments in maths and sciences in the region of Galicia

Descriptives on the control variables

Robust standard errors in parentheses. ** p < 0.05 and *** p < 0.01. a Pre × treated: treated region in the year previous to the treatment (2014); if significant, it indicates non-parallel pretrends. b Post × treated: treated region in years after the treatment (2015 to 2017). All the regressions are weighted by the population of each region, year and age-interval. Quantitative covariates are centered with respect to the annual mean of the variable. The regions of Cataluña and País Vasco are not included since they did not report the data of bullying cases. The region with significant effects in the placebo checkings are Com. Valenciana and Murcia for the 12-14 and 15-17 age intervals, respectively

Source: Spanish Ministry of Education

This paper is based on our previous work Beneito and Vicente-Chirivella ( 2020 ).

The Government of the Madrid region announced mobile phone bans in schools for the academic year 2020–2021.

Lepp et al. ( 2014 ) provide some evidence for college students.

Fiorini ( 2010 ), Fairlie ( 2005 ) and Malamud and Pop-Eleches ( 2011 ) find large positive effects of home computers on educational outcomes, while Woessmann and Fuchs ( 2004 ) and Vigdor et al. ( 2014 ) find evidence of negative effects of home computers on educational outcomes. Fairlie and Robinson ( 2013 ) do not find significant effects of owning a computer on any educational outcome.

Additional complementary uses of mobile technology in education have been studied, for instance, by Bergman ( 2021 ), who shows that providing information via text message, phone calls or e-mails to parents about their children’s academic progress, produce gains to student effort and achievements.

The need not to miss out what is happening in internet has been labeled as FOMO, “fear of missing out.”

In Spain the primary education goes from 6–11 years old. When children are 12, they change the stage and start the secondary education, in most of the cases moving to another educational center. According to official data from the National Statistics Office, INE, around 30% of children between 10 and 12-years-old have mobile phones, while around 64% of them have it at the age of 12.

Estadística de la Sociedad de la Información y la Comunicación en los Centros Educativos No Universitarios .

The contrast between the competencies of the central government and those of the regional governments in Spain, as well as the conflicts that frequently arise between them, has been highlighted by Harguindéguy et al. ( 2020 ).

Castilla La Mancha, Law 5/2014 of October 9, 2014; Galicia, Decree 17, 2015/1/27 of January 8, 2015).

For a summary of schools’ practices as regard the use of mobile phones in Spanish regions, available at: www.abc.es/familia/educacion/abci-regula-movil-colegios-cada-comunidad-autonoma-202001131534_noticia.html , last accessed 9 September 2021.

The autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla in the South, are excluded from our analysis due to its special conditions and anomalous data observed in some of the indicators used in the paper.

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), entered by the OECD in 2000, evaluates the competencies of representative samples of 15-year-old students every three years.

In preliminary work, we implemented different interpolation strategies. These are: cubic-spline interpolation; and no interpolation at all. The results with these two alternatives confirm a strong robustness of the results that will be presented below, both in quantitative terms and in terms of statistical significance. These results are available upon request.

The participation of students in the PISA installments is not compulsory but decided by each government. In Spain, each regional government decides on the participation of their students.

In our data set, we only have information about the bullying cases directly reported to the police by a family member of a bullied child. Ideally, it would have been much more desirable that each school had collected all the bullying incidents and then reported it to police forces. In this way, we would have had a more accurate picture of all types of bullying instead of only about particularly aggressive bullying incidents. We are very grateful to an anonymous referee for bringing this point to our attention.

INE, Cifras de población y censos detallados.

INE, Encuesta sobre equipamiento y uso de tecnologías de la información y comunicación en los hogares.

The financial component includes financial expenses, financial assets and financial liabilities. Some of the expenses included here are interest on debts, expenses for cancellation of debts, default interest and other financial expenses.

INE, Estadística de gasto público en educación, EDUCAbase.

INE, Contabilidad regional de los hogares.

As evidence of the suitability of the SCM for our type of data, it is worth mentioning that in the seminal paper of Abadie and Gardeazábal ( 2003 ), the authors first applied this method to region-year level data of the 17 Spanish autonomous regions, in their case to analyze the economic costs of conflict in the Basque Country in terms of GDP.

For a discussion of the data requirements and advantages of the SCM, see Abadie ( 2021 ).

Also, in the placebo findings, the estimated impacts are of smaller size than the estimated ones for Galicia and CLM (results are available upon request).

As an additional procedure to check for robustness and pre-trend differences, we also selected a “fake” year (2012) to replicate all the estimations. Our estimated results with that fake intervention year rendered no treatment effects for bullying, no effects for PISA results in the case of Galicia and no effects in the SCM for Galicia. In the case of the DID analysis for PISA scores in the region of CLM, coherently with the original findings, the data exhibited pre-treatment effects. These results are available upon request.

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Acknowledgements

Pilar Beneito acknowledges financial support from Grant ECO2017-86793-R funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”, and from Generalitat Valenciana (PROMETEO - 2019-95).

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What Students Are Saying About School Cellphone Bans

Policies restricting phone use in schools are trending. We asked students if they thought such rules were a good idea.

By The Learning Network

Nearly one in four countries has laws or policies banning or restricting student cellphone use in schools . Proponents say no-phone rules reduce student distractions and bullying. Critics say the bans could hinder student self-direction and critical thinking.

We asked teenagers what they thought: Should schools ban cellphones?

The reactions were mixed. Many students brought up the same reasons they wanted access to their phones during the day: to listen to music, to contact their parents and even for schoolwork. But many recognized the need for some boundaries around phone use, with several supporting an outright ban. Read their arguments below.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the conversation on our writing prompts this week, including students from Midtown High School in Atlanta ; Parkway South High School in Manchester, Mo. ; and Miami Country Day School in Miami, Fla .

Please note: Student comments have been lightly edited for length, but otherwise appear as they were originally submitted.

No phones in school? We’re all for it, some students said.

Recently, I stopped bringing my phone to school. I only had an Apple Watch to listen to music and message my family. This change has allowed me to focus more during my classes and I’ve come up with more creative ideas due to this change. To put it simply, while the banning of cellphones may take some time to fully get used to, it’s a necessity for all schools in order for their students to concentrate and participate more quickly. One of the main problems with cellphone usage in class is that students aren’t talking with one another. Instead, everyone is talking AT each other, because they’re always on their phones messaging or checking social media. With the banning of phones however, students can engage with one another without the use of technology, which can be described as “authentic,” or more personal.

— Leo, Midtown High School

I think that schools should ban cellphones because most problems in school typically circle back to cellphones. Students will take videos or photos of others during school and this gets uploaded to social media. They usually get bullied and aren’t comfortable being posted on social media. Kids are also always on their phones during class. Their grades start to go down and then they fail. All of these problems can be avoided if they just ban phones in school.

— Mylea, CNY

The phrase “eyes glued to the screen” is an understatement to how little students converse with one another due to something “more important” on their phone. It’s increasingly alarming and concerning that I have seen on many occasions a whole group of people sitting at a table, pressing away or scrolling on their phones, and all I hear is silence. Consequently, this adds to the overarching problem of mental health issues because of how attached students are to devices. They lose the skill of communication and therefore are not able to converse very well in the long-term.

— Alex, Manchester

I believe that we are in a weird time, where cellphone usage is so normalized, that being asked to put it away makes people mad. While I understand the annoyance with having your property confiscated, I do think it’s for the better of students. We are at a point where time and time again it’s been proven by ourselves that we have absolutely no self control and are unable to stay off phones when asked. I do think checking cameras and driving around during lunch is an extreme; but it may be necessary. If you need phones to do online classes, then use a computer. If older generations were able to make it 8 hours without checking an Instagram story, then so can we.

— emmies, midtown highschool

In my school, many students amble around campus, staring down at their phones, completely oblivious to the world around them. I have witnessed some of my peers bump into walls or into other students as they are entranced in their small electronic devices. The attention that students pay to their phones takes away from socializing, interacting, and learning throughout the school day. This has had a profound negative impact on their grades that is oftentimes irreversible. For example, in middle school, cellphone use was not permitted during the school day. Many of my peers were more engaged in their classes and thus had higher grades. When we got to high school, the rules changed and phones were allowed. Some of my same peers that had good grades, are now on academic probation for failing classes. Although this could be a result of many different factors, the main change from middle school to high school was phone usage.

Phones also interfere with quality social interactions. I noticed that in middle school, many students engaged more with one another, had quality conversations, and strong friendships. Some of these same students now have very few friends and engage with electronics more than people. It is important to keep in mind that this is the reality of some students, but not all. Many of my current friends in school have not let the electronic device world have such an intense impact on their lives, and therefore are very social and are doing fantastic academically.

— Arabella, Miami Country Day School/Miami Florida

Others recognized the need for some boundaries around phone use, but thought an outright ban went too far.

Cellphones should be limited, not banned, in schools but with a couple of key qualifications. During class time, I think there should be no phones allowed from when the bell rings to start the class to when the bell rings to end the class. There should be breaks in the middle of the class, as the teacher sees fit, such as how we do in some of my classes, to take a quick break and check notifications before getting back into it. This would hopefully influence students to use dedicated class time wisely and be more “checked in” so to speak while not missing out on possible crucial messages or emergencies that may come through during that class. However, if a student is in a free period, they should be able to use their phone. It is up to the student to use their time wisely outside of class to get their work done and allowing the student to have some independence in making a responsible choice as a young adult in the making is a positive.

— Jack, Ames, Iowa

An alternative to the use of phones in school is to heavily regulate media in the range of school, meaning not just banning social media under the school network but also having students log on to an application during school which only allows access to important needs for phones like contacting parents or educational apps, in case of a student’s laptop being dead, broken or forgotten at home. In the grand scheme of things, I believe removing a student’s phone would also cause more of a problem in the situation of an emergency because they will not be able to contact their parents. Banning them is definitely not necessary but a regulation on cell phones would be beneficial to students as a whole.

— Jaden, Sun Valley, CA

In every class, you’ll see people with their cellphone out, or laying on their desk next to them, just within reach for when it buzzes. Every time this buzz distracts the student, it takes their brain at least five seconds to focus back on the task they were working on, decreasing productivity and increasing errors. I believe that teachers should confiscate students’ phones during class, and have rules for when this confiscation is violated. However, if said class is a free period, the students could keep their phones out, to be able to communicate with their parents and keep up with their extracurriculars. Many parents should support their child focusing on school, and will be fine with them only responding in 90 minute intervals in between classes.

— Katya, Midtown High School

For me, the best policy for students is for teachers to take phones during classes and instructional time and give them back after class. I know some students are against having their phones taken during class, but I do think it increases focus. During free periods and lunch, I think it is important for students to have time to be there on their phones because it provides a time to relax and enjoy something not school-related.

— Ginny, J.R. Masterman Philadelphia

I use my phone as another device for my school work. For example, if I’m given a piece of writing to work on, I’ll have the assignment and instructions pulled up on my phone while I complete the work on my iPad. I understand the frustration teachers may have when they’re talking and multiple students are scrolling on TikTok or using Snapchat while learning a lesson. This can affect their work and education, however banning phones is excessive. If it’s become a problem or a setback in classes, setting a rule to make sure the phone stays in a bag can just may be an option. Otherwise it’s not easy for me to communicate among my parents, friends, or even boss.

— Sofia, Glenbard West High School

Some wanted unrestricted access to their phones during the day for a variety of reasons.

As a student who was born and raised in Ethiopia, we weren’t allowed to have a cellphone at all. It did have advantages like socializing, we ate lunch together and hung out together. We also did a lot of activities together but it didn’t do any good in my academics. Most parents and teachers worry that having a phone would be a distraction from having a better grade but for me, I had higher grades when I had my phone compared to my old grade when I didn’t have my phone. Although it might be distracting in class, it helped me a lot by using it for research or listening to music when I wanted to study. It also helped me to contact my parents whenever I wanted. I would not welcome a ban in my school because I learn with my phone since I work better when I research and take notes and most of my teachers just lecture.

— Yohanan, Vancouver, WA

When cellphones/messaging devices started out they were a hit. They gave some brief release for students that need a second to rest so they can focus better. This is still true today. I have to go through 5 periods without a break where I am either sitting at a desk or walking to class. Those few moments with my phone help a lot. Our attention spans are not infinite. Cellphones in schools also give me a connection to my home and parents when I need to talk to them. There has never been a student that has done poorly on a test and didn’t want to vent it out to someone. For me, this is my mom and dad. They are always good at calming me down and stopping me from spiraling. Without cellphones, I would never have that person close to help me.

— Tyson, Fountain Valley

There have been a few times this year when I’ve had to text my parents to come pick me up because I’ve been sick and needed to go home. The ease with which I was able to contact them would no longer exist if a phone ban was implemented, as not every teacher allows students free access to the office without a “valid” reason (and sickness isn’t always seen as such). Even if I were able to go to the office to reach my parents, the time this process took would be significantly longer. Thus, cellphone bans are simply too extreme for most schools, and districts should instead consider other forms of restriction to have the benefits of bans, without the consequences.

— Charlotte, Midtown High School

And a few thought students, rather than teachers or the school, should bear the burden for using their phones responsibly.

I don’t think schools should ban cellphones and I would not welcome a cellphone ban in my school. I think as high school students we need to be responsible for our own actions. If you are a student and you are on your phone in your class you need to accept the consequences that your grades and understanding of the material will suffer. Students need to learn how to pay attention in class without getting on their phones. In college no teachers are going to be getting them in trouble for being on their phones. How will they teach themselves the self control to not be on your phone in class?

— Kathryn, Maury High School

I have mixed emotions on this topic. I feel that high schoolers should be held responsible for their own education. If they choose to not pay attention in class and not take advantage of all the tools that their teachers are giving them, then they should do whatever they want. As 15-year-olds and up, high school teachers should not be held responsible for 100+ students learning. The student themselves needs to be responsible for their own learning and their own grades.

— Emily, Baker High School

At least one student said working to address the root causes of teenage “cellphone addiction” might be a better approach.

Many students are drawn to scrolling through social media as a coping mechanism or an escape from the fact that they struggle with school or have been otherwise discouraged from learning and connecting with their peers. While these are not excuses for being distracted or disrespectful, working to address the root causes of the widespread cellphone addiction might be more helpful long-term than a cellphone ban. While the ban seems to be an effective short term solution for the school day, it might harm students when they go to college or find themselves in a world where there are no strict bans and they must self-regulate their screen time. Working to address these root causes as well as fostering responsibility would help young people feel more connected to the world around them and better prepare them for the world.

— Abigail, Maury High School- Norfolk, VA

In the end, some saw the appeal of a ban but worried it would “only intensify” students’ negative attitudes toward school.

I understand why a ban might seem appealing to certain teachers and administrators, however, I also believe that it would be more harmful than beneficial in the long run. Many students already have negative attitudes toward school: a major cause of stress and dread for some. I strongly feel a cellphone ban would only intensify these negative attitudes towards school as a whole. It wouldn’t motivate students to attend, and would almost villainize the school itself. It just isn’t worth it. Speaking from experiences at my school and things that I’ve noticed, I observe that the majority of students do a good job staying off their phones and paying attention during class. Our school doesn’t strongly restrict phones, and it has never really been a problem. Additionally, I feel that a ban on cellphones would only do so much. If a student really wants to be on their phone, they will find a way to do so regardless of whatever ban may or may not be in place.

— Natalie, Glen Ellyn, IL

Learn more about Current Events Conversation here and find all of our posts in this column .

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Why banning cellphones in schools misses the point

By Emily McConville — Published on March 23, 2018

Though her school had a rule against using cellphones during class, a teacher allowed a student to use his phone to show her something lesson-related.

Another teacher permitted students to record homework assignments on their phones.

While the public often hears about “no phone” edicts in schools, the reality of cellphone use in schools tends to change from teacher to teacher and even from day to day, says Anita Charles, a lecturer in education at Bates who studies literacy and special education and who directs the college’s teacher education program for secondary teacher candidates.

Anita Charles teaches a class in special education. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

In fact, says Charles, cellphones get at “the heart of rule-building” in the classroom: The best rules are built on trust and respect, and that respect is a two-way street.

Since 2008, Charles has been part of the scholarly discussion about cellphone use in schools. That year, she observed classrooms and interviewed high school students and English teachers for a paper that was published in the journal American Secondary Education in 2012.

In 2017, she contributed a chapter to Researching New Literacies: Design, Theory, and Data in Sociocultural Investigation, offering insights into technology in the classroom and the nature of trust between students and teachers.

What did you learn from interviewing students and teachers about rules about cellphones and enforceability?

I found that when schools attempted a blanket policy, invariably, it was unenforceable. Teachers and students developed work-arounds.

What I found, without people explicitly stating it, or even knowing that they were doing it, was that managing cellphone use was really about contextualized negotiation, happening classroom by classroom, teacher by teacher, group by group. Overwhelmingly, I found that standards around cellphone use were founded on how students and teachers were building relationships with each other.

Even when teachers said, “I have this rule,” there was always the “but.” “I have this rule, BUT then again there are these times…” or, “Well there was a day when….” Even a teacher who was working in a school which did not allow any of these items in the classroom said, “I’m the teacher they can come to if they need to call their mom or if they need to jot down their homework. I don’t care.” She said, “I just think it’s reasonable to do that.”

Overwhelmingly, the students recognized when teachers were working with them to develop a reasonable policy. When they knew that teachers were developing policies that made sense, they also were much more likely to respect and honor those policies.  

Your initial interviews were a decade ago. How have cellphones and their roles in classrooms changed in the decade since?

Our technology is getting smarter and smarter, more intuitive, more sophisticated, more versatile, and also more prolific. It used to be easy enough to say, “Put away your cellphone,” when the only thing it did was make a phone call or text.

But now, it’s also your calendar, it may be your note-taker, you may be taking a picture of the board to get your homework assignments, it may be recording something you need. And there may be kids with differences or disabilities who prefer using these tools as a way to access schoolwork. Teachers also have their own devices in their hands.

We’re not turning back time, so we have to come up with a sensible way to say, “How do we engage with this in schools, and how do we develop rules?” Not even how do we develop rules, but how do we talk about reasonable guidelines?

What might a reasonable guideline be?

It’s not an all-or-nothing kind of thing. I think we need to have conversations. We can say to kids, “Have you thought about the pros and cons? How does a device work in your own life? How much time are you spending on your devices? What kind of time are you spending on them? What’s happening when you’re feeling that urge to get on it in the classroom?”

Students can articulate reasons, and I think we need to honor that and listen to that. I’d ask the participants in my study, “Are you texting in a classroom?” “Well, I’ll text in English, but not in math.” “Why?” “Well, in math, I have to pay attention more.” Or, “I never text in this particular class, because the teacher engages me, and I want to be learning.”

In my own Bates classes, I’ll start by saying that laptops and phones or devices may be used during class at their discretion, for class-related purposes. That gives a fair shot for people to be mature about the way in which they’re using them. It also allows for the fact that there are class-related purposes.

I don’t think we should shut down those processes, and it’s not for me to micromanage them either. I should not have to rotate through the back of the room and say, “Are those notes for this class? Are you enlarging that on your screen because you can’t see?” That’s not my business. I think we need to let go of our control a little bit.

What do you say to Bates students studying to be teachers about technology in the classroom?

I do observations with my student teachers who are placed in middle and high schools. One of the things I look for while scanning around the room is if any of those students are on devices.

Quite often, somebody does have one out, and they’re doing something quick with it. I then have a conversation with my student teacher: “Did you see it? What do you think about that? Is this becoming problematic?” I ask, “How are you thinking about this issue in your classroom?”

There’s something in teaching called “with-it-ness” and that can’t really be taught. It can be encouraged, but it can’t be taught. With-it-ness is having eyes in the back of your head, being aware of who has phones out. It’s positioning yourself in the classroom so you can do a scan. I think I’ve seen some pretty reasonable approaches with my student teachers who might say gently, “Put that away now,” or they go nearer to the student, tap on their desk, maybe give a reminder: “If I have to ask again, I’ll need to take it.”

You can’t become a monster in the classroom any more than you can for any other rule-breaking — and there are lots of ways that we can break rules. So what do we do? We gently redirect, we acknowledge it, we help students self-monitor. Self-monitoring is ultimately going to be a lot more successful than top-down monitoring.

It seems that managing cellphone use is more about relationships and trust.

The heart of rule-building in schools is about relationships. I’m not comfortable with someone saying, “What would you come up with for a rule?” We need to ask, “What’s the scenario?” and, “Let me talk with people, and let’s figure out what’s happening.”

In classrooms, we hear a lot about respect: Everyone needs to respect each other. But we don’t really talk about what that looks like or means. We’re all just supposed to know what respect is. Meanwhile, we can say that we believe in respect, but we also say, “Don’t touch your phones because I don’t trust you with them.” My take on that is that our actions certainly speak louder than words. If I say, “Let’s work through what we can all live with in terms of cellphone use in the classrooms,” that relationship helps us negotiate out what’s okay and what isn’t okay.

And if we respect, trust, like, and support each other, then we are engaging in an agreement. We can explicitly articulate some of that agreement. We could even have it up on the walls and all sign off on it. But some of it happens when we engage with each other. When a student asks if they can take a photo of the board so they have the homework assignment, then that might become a new protocol in the classroom. I think that’s a reasonable protocol.

And if someone abuses the trust then you can deal with it as an abuse of trust, not necessarily something specific to cellphones.

Right, just like any situation where somebody abuses trust. If I have a rule about food in the classroom and somebody decides to throw food all over the place, they’ve abused that trust. So we have to renegotiate, or we have to tighten up the reins or say, “Gosh, that really disappoints me.” If we’re in relationships, that sense of disappointment speaks more loudly than a hard and fast rule.

People can abuse any privilege, like driving a car or having a pen or pencil in your hand. We have to work with those cases as, “Gee, I was trusting you, and we were building a rapport, and you have really not abided by that expectation, and what do we do next?” That’s the way we should handle any of these things.

Teenagers have an uncanny sense of fairness and what’s reasonable. They appreciate being treated as young adults, but they also appreciate boundaries — they don’t actually want a free-for-all. Negotiation, when they feel that they’re being listened to, benefits everybody, because the teacher finds that students become more cooperative.

If we approach cellphone use as negotiating a relationship, it’s not all subversive. It’s not all under the current somewhere. It’s not kids sneaking out to the bathroom to use their phone.

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Indiana lawmakers ban cellphones in class. Now it's up to schools to figure out how

From IPBS News

Kirsten Adair

Around the country, state legislatures and school districts are looking at ways to keep cellphones from being a distraction in schools. monkeybusinessimages/Getty Images hide caption

Around the country, state legislatures and school districts are looking at ways to keep cellphones from being a distraction in schools.

School officials in Indiana are looking forward to class without the buzz of cellphones next school year. A new law with heavy bipartisan support requires school districts to adopt policies banning students from having wireless devices during class time.

The law applies to cellphones, tablets, laptops or gaming devices. It allows exemptions for educational purposes with a teacher's permission, in emergencies or to manage health care. Students can also use technology if they have a disability or as part of an individualized education program.

Florida passed a similar law last year and Kentucky, Vermont, Tennessee and Kansas are considering it. Supporters say the laws reduce distractions in the classroom , cut down on bullying through social media and encourage more in-person interaction.

Many schools in the state — and elsewhere — already had these bans on their own. Now others will have to adopt them, though the law doesn't spell out how to enforce them.

David Bloomfield, a professor of education leadership, law and policy at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, said the law means more work for schools and staff.

"The cellphones have to be removed from their persons, and they have to be stored somewhere away from that individual," he said. "That's going to take time. It's going to take expense, and it's going to take enforcement."

Bloomfield said some schools use technology-blocking software, but that raises questions about how students can use their phones in emergencies.

He also said the law's lack of specific enforcement measures could lead to racial disparities in how the policies — or penalties — are applied.

"It's easy for states to require districts to have policies, but they're really offloading the job to school districts, and then obviously to schools to enforce those policies," he said.

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So your tween wants a smartphone read this first.

Indiana Rep. Julie McGuire, a Republican and one of the sponsors of the bill in the legislature, said some teachers now don't have the power to confiscate phones even when they create a distraction. She said the new law will reduce problematic behavior around social media and teach students to replace screen time with more face-to-face communication.

"While we cannot control the amount of time students spend on social media outside school hours, we can provide reprieve during the seven hours per day that should be focused on learning," she said.

Democratic Rep. Matt Pierce opposed the bill, questioning the need for mandating what he said should be obvious.

"From the policy perspective, it makes sense," he said. "The other part of me is like, really? We need a bill so a school corporation can have a common-sense policy telling its kids not to use these devices? I was going to vote against this bill just because I don't think it's needed, but now I've got somebody telling me that you've got a school somewhere that's telling some teacher they can't just take the darn phone away. I don't get it."

The bill was signed by Indiana's Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb in early March. and the law takes effect July 1.

Some districts, like Indianapolis Public Schools, will not be largely affected by the new law because they already have similar policies in place. Other districts vary.

At Westfield Washington School District, communications director Joshua Andrews said high school students there can only have their phones at lunch and between classes. However, middle school students cannot use their phones at all during the school day.

"When you change something that big, it kind of makes people recoil a little bit. But, there's been little to no problems with it since we've rolled it out," he said.

Other districts are still in the process of developing policies.

Terry Terhune, superintendent at Greenwood Community School Corp., said students at his schools generally aren't supposed to have their phones out during class unless they have a teacher's permission. However, the rules vary by grade level.

"One of my goals is to try to meet with some of our neighboring school districts and see kind of where everybody lands on that," he said. "Within our county, Johnson County, I would like to try to be consistent with other districts. But again, everybody's going to have their own opinion on those things."

Kirsten Adair covers education for Indiana Public Broadcasting.

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March 22, 2021

Banning mobile phones in schools can improve students' academic performance

by Louis-Philippe Beland, The Conversation

The effects of mobiles phones and other technology at school is a hotly debated topic in many countries. Some advocate for a complete ban to limit distractions, while others suggest using technology as a teaching tool.

Kids in public South Australian primary schools started the school year without being allowed to bring their mobile phones to class, unless they are needed for class activity. All students in public Western Australian Victorian , and Tasmanian schools have a mobile phone ban in place since for all or some of 2020. New South Wales also banned mobile phones in public primary schools, with secondary schools having the option to opt in, since the start of 2020.

Education departments have introduced the bans for various reasons including to improve academic outcomes and decrease bullying.

Several recent papers point to positive impact of banning mobile phones at school on student performance and other outcomes. Understanding the evidence is crucial for best policy.

In a 2015 paper , we used a method—called a difference-in-difference strategy —as well as student data from England to investigate the effect of banning mobile phones on student performance. In this method, we compared schools that have had phones removed to similar schools with no phone bans. This allowed us to isolate the effect of mobiles phones on student performance from other factors that could affect performance.

We found banning mobile phones at school leads to an increase in student performance. Our results suggest that after schools banned mobile phones, test scores of students aged 16 increased by 6.4% of a standard deviation. This is equivalent to adding five days to the school year or an additional hour a week.

The effects were twice as large for low-achieving students, and we found no impact on high achieving students.

Our results suggest low-performing students are more likely to be distracted by the presence of mobile phones, while high performing students can focus with or without mobile phones.

The results of our paper suggest banning mobile phones has considerable benefits including a reduction in the gap between high- and low- achieving students. This is substantial improvement for a low-cost education policy.

Other studies show similar results

Recent studies from Spain and Norway , using a similar empirical strategy to ours, also show compelling evidence on the benefit of banning mobile phones on student performance, with similar effect size.

In Spain, banning mobile phones has been shown to increase students' scores in maths and science. Researchers also documented a decrease in incidences of bullying.

In Norway, banning phones significantly increased middle school students' grade point average. It also increased students' likelihood of attending an academic high school rather than choosing a vocational school. And it decreased incidents of bullying.

Evidence from Belgium suggests banning mobile phones can be beneficial for college student performance. This context might be different, but still informative as students are of similar age to those in high school.

Research from Sweden , however, suggests little effect of banning mobile phones in high school on student performance. It is worth noting, however, the study did not find any detrimental effect of banning mobile phones.

A similar conclusion can be drawn from the literature on the effect of computers used at school. Evidence from the US suggests using laptops in class is detrimental to learning, and the effects are large and more damaging for low-performing students.

Potential psychological mechanisms involved

The psychological literature might shed lights on the potential mechanisms as to why mobile phones and other technology in school might affect student performance . This literature finds multitasking is detrimental to learning and task execution.

Many recent experimental papers present evidence mobile phone use while executing another task decreases learning and task completion. Research also shows computers might be a less efficient way to take notes than pen and paper.

It may be that taking notes by hand allows you to remember the material better than typing those notes on a computer. This may be because students are not just typing out every word said, but thinking of how to summarize what they're hearing.

These findings do not discount the possibility mobile phones and other technology could be a useful structured teaching tool. However, ignoring or misunderstanding the evidence could be harmful to students and lead to long term negative social consequences.

Provided by The Conversation

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We looked at all the recent evidence on mobile phone bans in schools – this is what we found

Professor, School of Early Childhood & Inclusive Education, Queensland University of Technology

Associate Professor in Education, The University of Queensland

Disclosure statement

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Queensland University of Technology and University of Queensland provide funding as members of The Conversation AU.

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Mobile phones are currently banned in all Australian state schools and many Catholic and independent schools around the country. This is part of a global trend over more than a decade to restrict phone use in schools.

Australian governments say banning mobile phones will reduce distractions in class , allow students to focus on learning , improve student wellbeing and reduce cyberbullying .

But previous research has shown there is little evidence on whether the bans actually achieve these aims.

Many places that restricted phones in schools before Australia did have now reversed their decisions. For example, several school districts in Canada implemented outright bans then revoked them as they were too hard to maintain. They now allow teachers to make decisions that suit their own classrooms.

A ban was similarly revoked in New York City , partly because bans made it harder for parents to stay in contact with their children.

What does recent research say about phone bans in schools?

We conducted a “scoping review” of all published and unpublished global evidence for and against banning mobile phones in schools.

Our review, which is pending publication, aims to shed light on whether mobile phones in schools impact academic achievement (including paying attention and distraction), students’ mental health and wellbeing, and the incidence of cyberbullying.

A scoping review is done when researchers know there aren’t many studies on a particular topic. This means researchers cast a very inclusive net, to gather as much evidence as possible.

Read more: Why a ban on cellphones in schools might be more of a distraction than the problem it’s trying to fix

Our team screened 1,317 articles and reports as well as dissertations from masters and PhD students. We identified 22 studies that examined schools before and after phone bans. There was a mix of study types. Some looked at multiple schools and jurisdictions, some looked at a small number of schools, some collected quantitative data, others sought qualitative views.

In a sign of just how little research there is on this topic, 12 of the studies we identified were done by masters and doctoral students. This means they are not peer-reviewed but done by research students under supervision by an academic in the field.

But in a sign of how fresh this evidence is, almost half the studies we identified were published or completed since 2020.

The studies looked at schools in Bermuda, China, the Czech Republic, Ghana, Malawi, Norway, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the United States. None of them looked at schools in Australia.

Academic achievement

Our research found four studies that identified a slight improvement in academic achievement when phones were banned in schools. However, two of these studies found this improvement only applied to disadvantaged or low-achieving students.

Some studies compared schools where there were partial bans against schools with complete bans. This is a problem because it confuses the issue.

But three studies found no differences in academic achievement, whether there were mobile phone bans or not. Two of these studies used very large samples. This masters thesis looked at 30% of all schools in Norway. Another study used a nationwide cohort in Sweden . This means we can be reasonably confident in these results.

Mental health and wellbeing

Two studies in our review, including this doctoral thesis , reported mobile phone bans had positive effects on students’ mental health. However, both studies used teachers’ and parents’ perceptions of students’ wellbeing (the students were not asked themselves).

Two other studies showed no differences in psychological wellbeing following mobile phone bans. However, three studies reported more harm to students’ mental health and wellbeing when they were subjected to phone bans.

The students reported they felt more anxious without being able to use their phone. This was especially evident in one doctoral thesis carried out when students were returning to school after the pandemic, having been very reliant on their devices during lockdown.

So the evidence for banning mobile phones for the mental health and wellbeing of student is inconclusive and based only on anecdotes or perceptions, rather than the recorded incidence of mental illness.

Bullying and cyberbullying

Four studies reported a small reduction in bullying in schools following phone bans, especially among older students. However, the studies did not specify whether or not they were talking about cyberbullying.

Teachers in two other studies, including this doctoral thesis , reported they believed having mobile phones in schools increased cyberbullying.

But two other studies showed the number of incidents of online victimisation and harassment was greater in schools with mobile phone bans compared with those without bans. The study didn’t collect data on whether the online harassment was happening inside or outside school hours.

The authors suggested this might be because students saw the phone bans as punitive, which made the school climate less egalitarian and less positive. Other research has linked a positive school climate with fewer incidents of bullying.

There is no research evidence that students do or don’t use other devices to bully each other if there are phone bans. But it is of course possible for students to use laptops, tablets, smartwatches or library computers to conduct cyberbullying.

Even if phone bans were effective, they would not address the bulk of school bullying. A 2019 Australian study found 99% of students who were cyberbullied were also bullied face-to-face.

Read more: Banning mobile phones in schools: beneficial or risky? Here's what the evidence says

What does this tell us?

Overall, our study suggests the evidence for banning mobile phones in schools is weak and inconclusive.

As Australian education academic Neil Selwyn argued in 2021 , the impetus for mobile phone bans says more about MPs responding to community concerns rather than research evidence.

Politicians should leave this decision to individual schools, which have direct experience of the pros or cons of a ban in their particular community. For example, a community in remote Queensland could have different needs and priorities from a school in central Brisbane.

Mobile phones are an integral part of our lives. We need to be teaching children about appropriate use of phones, rather than simply banning them. This will help students learn how to use their phones safely and responsibly at school, at home and beyond.

Read more: School phone bans seem obvious but could make it harder for kids to use tech in healthy ways

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Argumentative Essay Example: Cell Phones Should Be Banned in Schools

Do you ever sit in a class and realize that students aren’t paying attention because they are distracted by their cell phones? In free periods, just about every student sits on their phone with their head down. Why waste time when you can spend that free time doing school work or interacting with others? In other classes, students are missing out on information because they are on their cell phones. Cell phones are just setting up students for failure. Do we really want students to fail? No. Cell phones should be banned in schools. 

The main reason why students miss out on  information is because of cell phones. When students sit on their cell phones during class, it makes it very difficult for them to stay focused. Since the use of cell phones has increased, cyberbullying is also starting to increase. During the school day, if a student sees that they are left out of a group chat or sees a photo to which they compare themselves too, can make it hard for them to stay focused throughout the school day.

Along with students being distracted, cell phones have caused a decline in communication between students. Joe Clemet, a U.S. government teacher, and Matt Miles, also a teacher, have said that “free periods have deteriorated from lively talk among students and teachers to silent screen reading, each student in a little world.” Clement thought that he could bring back the lively talk of students during a free period class by restricting cell phones. Students responded by not showing up and going to a different free period class where cell phones weren’t  restricted. It has also been found that cell phone use increases the rate of depression. Face-to-face time with friends decreases depression. Creating a school environment without cell phones can help students have a face-to-face interaction with others. This will help create a healthy environment for students in school. 

Furthermore, cell phone use does not boost achievement. Students who are on their cell phones during class time, tend to perform worse on tests (usually a full letter grade or more). According to a study in 2017, some participants were told to keep their cell phones nearby, and the other participants were told to put their cell phones in a different room. Each participant was asked to perform a memory task. The participants with their cell phones did much worse than the participants who didn’t have their cell phones. For instance, in one of my classes, I see students who don’t even pick up their heads because they are on their cell phones. When it's time for them to take a test, they have no idea what they are doing. When they get their test grade back, they seem to not know why they performed so poorly. They performed so poorly because they were distracted by their cell phone. They don’t realize all the information they missed out on. Some schools have changed their cell phone policy and they saw an increase in test scores by 6.41%. This shows that cell phones are causing students to perform poorly. 

Finally, some schools believe that the use of cell phones should not be banned. Some schools have even worked cell phones into the daily curriculum. From text reminders to school apps, cell phones are making the learning system much easier. Even though cell phones are making the learning system easier,  there will be a higher chance that students will cheat, cell phones will still cause distractions, and there will still be less interaction. Even if cell phones are useful tools for the learning system, they still won’t solve these problems. 

In conclusion, cell phones create an unhealthy environment for students. They cause distractions, failure, and less interactions. Cell phones are an unhealthy distraction for students. They should be banned in schools.

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Where Should Students Be Allowed to Use Cellphones? Here’s What Educators Say

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Corrected : A chart in a previous version of this story contained incorrect percentages for where educators say students should be allowed to use cellphones.

To ban or not to ban? This question has been front and center for many schools recently as they strategize how to address students’ ubiquitous use of cellphones.

With nearly 9 in 10 teens 13 and older possessing a smartphone , these devices have become a major source of distraction and disruption in schools, especially when students’ online arguments spill over into in-school arguments and physical fights.

And many educators and school support staff feel that students’ constant access to social media on their smartphones is harming their mental wellbeing and hurting their ability to learn. Some educators go so far to say that students are addicted to their devices.

Nearly a quarter of teachers, principals, and district leaders think that cellphones should be banned from school grounds, according to a recent nationwide survey conducted in September and October by the EdWeek Research Center.

But, overall, educators are divided on the issue.

“We should be learning to manage cellphones in the classroom. They are here to stay,” one educator said in the survey. “BUT they are the biggest distraction.”

Said another survey respondent: “We recently banned cellphones. Previously, they were allowed during passing time and at lunch. However, they had taken over instructional time. Students would get out their phones without thinking and teachers would have to spend as much time redirecting as they were teaching. That, or have a power struggle over confiscation.”

But schools face headwinds from students and parents—many of whom want to be able to reach their children throughout the day—when they try to restrict students’ access to cellphones during the school day.

And as the charts below show, in many cases there’s a yawning gap between what students are allowed to do and what educators think would be best for schools.

For example, nearly three-quarters of teachers, principals, and district leaders say that high school students in their schools and districts are allowed to use their phones during lunch, but only half believe that should be permitted.

The survey also found that a significantly larger share of teachers are in favor of banning cellphones on campus than district leaders. Principals were more in line with teachers than district leaders on that decision.

The following charts show where students are allowed to use cellphones on campus, where educators think phones should be permitted, and how teachers, principals, and district leaders differ on the issue of an all-out cellphone ban.

Data analysis for this article was provided by the EdWeek Research Center. Learn more about the center’s work.

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Cell Phone Pouches Promise to Improve Focus at School. Kids Aren’t Convinced

W hen the students at Eastlake High School in Colorado Springs, Colo., returned to their school building in January 2021 following the COVID-19 lockdowns, principal Cassandra Berry noticed that they were glued to their phones even more than before. Students texted throughout classes, ignoring teachers. Fights broke out, sparked by nasty missives sent over DMs and posted on social media. 

“We had a couple of fights, and unfortunately, one of them was taped by a student in the classroom and posted on social media,” Berry says. “We wanted to make sure to nip that in the bud.” 

After mulling different solutions, Berry signed a contract this year with Yondr, an ed-tech company that sells locked pouches for cell phones. Berry learned about them when she went to a Dave Chappelle comedy show that required audience members to stow their phones during the performance. She liked the experience and thought it could be effective for her students as well. 

Eastlake High School now is one of thousands of schools across the world that have turned to Yondr in order to combat phone addiction and distraction. Founded in 2014, Yondr has rapidly expanded since the pandemic and now serves more than 1 million students in 21 countries. The company has had more than a tenfold increase in sales from government contracts since 2021, from $174,000 to $2.13 million, according to GovSpend , a data service. 

Some teachers swear by Yondr, saying it has dramatically transformed their classrooms to allow students to actually focus on learning. But many students have decried it as invasive and paternalistic, and some parents argue that phones are a safety tool, especially given the proliferation of school shootings. Some experts also worry that the money spent on Yondr could be better spent on other resources. 

“I would call into question if you’re putting it into schools that are quote-unquote under-resourced academically,” says Tanji Reed Marshall, CEO and principal consultant of Liaison Educational Partners. ‘“So you don't want to support my academics, but you want to put my money on buying a tool to keep me off my phone?’”

The debate over whether phones belong in schools has raged for more than a decade. A 2015 study found that test scores rose by as much as 6% after cell phone bans were enacted. Phone usage has only escalated since then: A Pew Research Center study last year found that a third of teens were on social media “almost constantly.” 

A majority of parents support limits on cell phone usage in schools, one study found, and many schools already have cell phone bans in place. But the same study found that parents are largely skeptical of taking phones away from kids outright. And many students have tried to resist these more restrictive measures. At least 80 petitions calling for schools to stop using Yondr have been created on Change.org. “They are inconvenient and a waste of money,” reads one petition started in January 2023, which has garnered over 600 signatures. 

Nevertheless, some U.S. school districts, including in Holyoke, Mass., and Akron, Ohio , have mandated it for middle and high school students, and legislative efforts may be coming as well: Both Republican and Democratic Senators have flagged tamping down cell phone use as a priority this congressional year. Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton told CBS News , "Teachers dislike cell phones the way the devil hates holy water."

A Yondr spokesperson addressed student concerns in an email, writing, “There will always be students who try to push boundaries, but in our experience, we see 90/95% compliance in the vast majority of our schools, practically overnight….Yondr is not a punishment, we know that when students are given the opportunity to experience a phone-free school environment, they feel the benefits and can then fully understand why it's a good idea to have regular breaks from their phones/social media.” The spokesperson added that the company’s reach in schools is expected to “grow significantly” for the next academic year. 

At the start of every day at Eastlake High School, students turn off their phones and put them in individual Yondr pouches. They keep their ensconced phones on them and then unlock them by tapping them on a magnetic device at the end of each day as they leave. After more than a month of Yondr usage, Berry says the experiment is helping students focus. “We had a young lady who half the time she's engaged and half the time she's not. After we started doing Yondr, one day she told the teacher, ‘Well, I guess I gotta do classwork, because I don’t have anything else to do,’” Berry says. 

Berry says the number of fights between students has decreased, because there are fewer impetuses to start them. “They don't have to worry about what someone's saying about them or what someone thinks about them, because they don’t see it throughout the day,” Berry says. “They're all working on their work.” 

Yondr typically costs $25 to $30 a student. Berry says that Eastlake High School used Title IV funds to pay about $2,400 for 80 pouches. She acknowledges that Eastlake’s small size—fewer than 100 kids—allowed them to keep the costs down.  

One public school teacher in New South Wales in Australia, who was contacted by TIME via Reddit direct message, has also been very happy with Yondr since their school district implemented it two years ago. “We know that a number of students don't use them correctly and still have their phones accessible, but they're rarely being brought out and used in class or during breaks, which was a significant problem before,” the teacher wrote. “I'm not paranoid about students filming or photographing me during class to then post on social media and rant about me. We've also noticed that our students are far more active and social during their breaks.” (The teacher, who teaches 12- to 18-year-olds, asked TIME not to use their name because they were not authorized to speak about school policies.)

But Yondr’s rollout has been far from perfect. Marshall consulted for a large public school in Massachusetts that tried to introduce it last fall. For a while, the effort was successful: “The administration found that the building didn't have as much high energy, because their weekend drama isn't coming to school with all the texting,” Marshall says. 

Within weeks, however, students began to fight back against the program, which they perceived as a control mechanism—especially because the other two schools that shared the same building did not require the pouches. “The students felt put upon. They didn't feel as though they were part of the process and felt this was targeted towards Black and brown kids in schools that are under-resourced,” she says. 

And once students started to rebel, they found ways to get to their phones in spite of the pouch.  “Students were very adept at adapting to this new environment,” Marshall says. “They found ways to keep phones and pretend they had Yondr. They found ways to break into the Yondr; they found ways to ignore it altogether.” Within 60 days, Marshall says the teachers at the school stopped enforcing the use of Yondr. 

Similarly, Regina Galinski, a New York City parent, says that her child’s school’s use of Yondr has been relatively ineffective. “It’s pretty useless, since kids have access to Chromebooks and just chat that way,” she wrote over Facebook Messenger. “It helps in the lower grades when kids follow rules, but as they get older, they are pointless. If you hit the pouch hard enough, it pops open.” 

“The pouch is very durable,” a Yondr spokesperson said, “and schools are provided with guidance and processes in which they can ensure students are compliant.” 

Improving schools via technology and other novel solutions has proved challenging. A February 2024 report examined a $1.4 billion Department of Education initiative to develop and test new ideas in the classroom and found that only a quarter of those innovations yielded any positive benefits for students and no negative harms.

Marshall says she’s not against Yondr but believes it needs to be rolled out in a conscientious way, and with the buy-in of everyone involved: students, parents, and teachers. “Yondr is neither good nor bad,” Marshall says. “It’s as good or bad as the systems and the conditions around which it is meant to operate.”

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Banning phones in class isn’t always popular, but some schools in NC say it’s working

When the students walk in, their smartphones are turned off at Rolesville Middle School.

Rolesville Middle is among a growing number of schools around North Carolina and nationally that limit student access to their phones when they’re in class. It’s part of an effort, supporters say, to reduce classroom distractions and to curb social media addiction among students.

“It’s not a ban like we’re against cellphones,” Angela Cooper, Rolesville Middle’s principal, said in an interview. “We’re just more for students being engaged and learning and lessening the impact that happens when kids are on phones on social media.

“They’re adolescents. They’re not able to be responsible enough to be on social media without close supervision, and we can’t closely supervise cellphones.”

Barring cellphones in schools isn’t popular, though, with some parents and students.

“Focusing on harsh lockdowns and harsh policies isn’t the way to do it,” Zahara Mushinge, 17, a junior at Audrey Kell High School in Charlotte, said in an interview. “It just creates a more harsh environment. Students aren’t afraid to protest.”

97% of teens use phones in school

Schools have been debating whether to allow students to have phones for more than two decades.

In the 2021-22 school year, 76% of U.S. public schools prohibited non-academic use of phones during school hours, according to the National Center for Education Statistics . The ban was highest in elementary and middle schools but dropped to 43% in high schools.

Lots of schools have phone policies, but many don’t enforce them, according to Kim Whitman, a co-founder of the Phone-Free Schools Movement . Her group is urging schools around the nation to require students to have their phones turned off and placed the whole school day in a cell phone locker or secure pouch.

Concerns have escalated because of the rise in mental health issues and social media addiction among young people. A study released in 2023 by Common Sense Media found that 97% of teens used their phones during school hours .

Southern Alamance Middle School made national headlines earlier this year after it removed mirrors from bathrooms to deter students from going there to film TikTok videos.

“With a lot of our kids, sometimes it’s like ‘I need the phone as much as I need to breathe,’” Kyanna McCall, a seventh-grade teacher at Rolesville Middle, said in an interview. “Like ‘we are together, we are one.’”

Wake County, Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Durham are among the North Carolina school districts that have joined a federal class-action lawsuit accusing the owners of major social media apps of deliberately addicting young people . A similar class-action lawsuit has been filed by more than 40 states, including North Carolina, against the company that owns Facebook and Instagram .

Florida and Indiana have passed laws requiring public schools to have rules banning students from using cell phones in class. Now governors and legislators in at least a half-dozen other states are pushing their schools to follow suit — through persuasion or by law, according to Stateline .

CMS cracks down on phones in class

A state Senate bill to study cell phone use in North Carolina public schools was filed last year but never got out of committee

In the absence of state action, it’s been up to individual school districts and schools to handle the issue.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools announced before the start of this school year it would ramp up enforcement of an existing policy that says students can’t use their phones in class. CMS did not immediately respond to The News & Observer’s request for information on how the crackdown has gone.

A lot of students feel the phone rule is unnecessary, according to Joy Alabi, 18, a senior at West Mecklenburg High School in Charlotte. Alabi said banning cellphones in class won’t automatically make students pay more attention.

“Taking their phones away isn’t going to make them engaged,” Alabi, a vice president of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Youth Council, said in an interview. “They can either fall asleep, walk out of class or look at the teacher and not be engaged. You need to find curriculum and activities that will engage the students.”

Persuading students to turn phones off

In Wake County, the decision about phone access for students is left up to principals.

Cooper instituted a rule that students have to turn off their phones while on campus when she became Rolesville Middle’s principal in 2022. The ban also covers lunch, a time when some other schools let students use their phones.

Cooper said that coming back from the COVID-19 pandemic, she recognized that many students had lost the ability to socialize with their peers.

“That socialization is critical for our children, so no I don’t want them on devices during lunch,” Cooper said.

McCall, the seventh-grade teacher, said there was a lot of moaning and groaning from students when the new policy started. She said they had to persuade students that their phone was “not an extension of you.”

“When you walk in the building, your phone is no longer a thing,” McCall said. “When you walk out of the building, you now are welcome back to the world of that kind of technology, where it’s back to our phones.”

Students less distracted now

Two years later, staff at Rolesville Middle say the climate has improved under the new phone rules.

“They’re much less distracted because they’re not trying to get on their phone and see who their Snapchat notification is from or who texted them,” Lauren Miron, a Rolesville Middle eighth-grade teacher, said in an interview. “They’re able to focus and minimize distractions during class.”

There are also fewer behavioral incidents now, according to Stacy Hayes, a counselor at Rolesville Middle. She said students can no longer use their phones in class to post unflattering photos and comments about classmates.

The phone ban has led to a more “safe and orderly school,” according to Cooper.

“Every child wants to be in a building where they don’t have to worry about somebody recording them or somebody sending them mean messages during the day,” Cooper added.

Winning students over to phone ban

The phone rules have won over at least some students.

“The reality of becoming trapped in technology or addicted to it is becoming more and more normal in this world,” Carter-Reid West, 13, an eighth-grader at Rolesville Middle, said in an interview. “I think not having your phone 24/7 in a learning environment not only helps you with focus but also helps you curb that addiction a little. It also just teaches you to just enjoy school in general.”

Kissmelly Mendoza, 13, a seventh-grade student, regularly checks her social media apps on her phone. But it’s ingrained in her that she has to wait until after she leaves school before she goes online.

“I have something to do, something to keep me occupied,” Mendoza said in an interview. “I’m not like ‘oh, when am I going to be on the phone?’”

Phone access during school shootings

One of the biggest obstacles to winning student and parent support for phone bans is the fear of possible school shootings.

Some schools allow students to keep their phones in their pockets or bookbags. Other schools require phones to be placed in lockers, lock boxes or secure pouches designed to keep students physically away from their devices.

Mushinge, the CMS student, said some of her friends couldn’t get to their phones during August’s shooting at UNC-Chapel Hill. She said her friends wanted to reach siblings who were on campus to see if they were safe.

“There are incidents where students have to become the humans that they are,” Mushigne said. “There are situations which happen outside of school.”

But Whitman of the Phone-Free Schools Movement said having a phone is an “emotional safety blanket” for parents that won’t actually make students safer.

“We know there’s a loud few that want 24/7 access to their children,” Whitman said in an interview. “But what we try to do is show that’s not best for the development of their children.

“Really right now we’re in a place where society is putting convenience before the development needs of children.”

©2024 The Charlotte Observer. Visit charlotteobserver.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.