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Phones are distracting students in class. More states are pressing schools to ban them (www.nbcnews.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

131 comments fedilink hide all child comments

In California, a high school teacher complains that students watch Netflix on their phones during class. In Maryland, a chemistry teacher says students use gambling apps to place bets during the school day.

Around the country, educators say students routinely send Snapchat messages in class, listen to music and shop online, among countless other examples of how smartphones distract from teaching and learning.

The hold that phones have on adolescents in America today is well-documented, but teachers say parents are often not aware to what extent students use them inside the classroom. And increasingly, educators and experts are speaking with one voice on the question of how to handle it: Ban phones during classes.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Reports from teachers vs. actual video evidence are not really comparable, are they?

Because the former goes back to the old problem of their words against the child's, which is exactly why cameras are helpful.

If there is actually data backing up what those teachers claim, fine. But otherwise we're talking about subjective claims vs. objective video, the latter exposing activity that should be a firing offense at least if not necessitating criminal charges.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Sure thing, here's some random studies.

https://www.edweek.org/leadership/digital-distractions-in-class-linked-to-lower-academic-performance/2023/12

About two-thirds of U.S. students reported that they get distracted by using digital devices, and about 54 percent said they get distracted by other students who are using those resources, the PISA results found.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5648953/

The main findings of the study were that 67% of students were distracted by use of cell phones and 21% of them were extremely disturbed and it affected their learning.

https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1350.pdf

We find that following a ban on phone use, student test scores improve by 6.41% of a standard deviation. Our results indicate that there are no significant gains in student performance if a ban is not widely complied with. Furthermore, this effect is driven by the most disadvantaged and underachieving pupils. Students in the lowest quartile of prior achievement gain 14.23% of a standard deviation, whilst, students in the top quartile are neither positively nor negatively affected by a phone ban. The results suggest that low-achieving students are more likely to be distracted by the presence of mobile phones, while high achievers can focus in the classroom regardless of the mobile phone policy. This also implies that any negative externalities from phone use do not impact on the high achieving students. Schools could significantly reduce the education achievement gap by prohibiting mobile phone use in schools.

Students themselves report phones being significantly distracting, including to other people that aren't using them, and there's even evidence that banning phones directly increases student performance, especially amongst low-performing students.

How does this compare against the benefits of exposing teacher bigotry? I won't pretend to know how to quantify that, but I'm not making the positive claim that banning phones is necessarily worth the loss of ability to expose teachers. My only point is that it is plausible that this is the case, and I think I've supplied decent evidence for that. Policy questions very rarely are between "good option" and "bad option", but rather "bad option" vs "worse option".

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Okay, that is fair. The original article did not bring any numbers. And that does make me conflicted, but I think after seeing all that I saw going to a red state public school that some sort of way for students to show that their teachers did something they shouldn't have and be believed is necessary as an alternative or we'll go back to what I grew up with.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

To be clear, speaking as someone who got to enjoy being a gay atheist teenager going to school in rural Missouri, I get your point. However, negative things that directly impacted me or people like me aren't necessarily more important than negative impacts on other people, and when you're faced with decisions that genuinely do come down to direct trade-offs, you have to take a comprehensive and holistic view.

To throw a stupidly exaggerated example out, if I had a button that would fire every homophobic teacher in the country but also reduce the academic performance of all students by 5%, I personally wouldn't feel comfortable pressing it. Of course on the flip side, I probably wouldn't enjoy being faced with the opposite button that increases all students performance by 5% but also introduces some amount of homophobic teachers. My only point here is that these aren't simple and easy questions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I guess the main question is if a digital device is inherently distracting or if the issue is how it is used. Also at a certain point a distraction is a tool that can be used for learning too.

I was a privileged kid in a private highschool we didn't have smart phones yet (they came out when I was in college) but we did have laptops in class.

At first we had full Internet access via WiFi. Then the school slowly started to filter traffic by blocking certain sites. So naturally I learned for to install a proxy on Firefox so I could go to addictinggames.com during the especially boring parts of class. I would still take notes (enough to pass all my classes) and some teachers were so entertaining that I never wanted to do anything but pay attention.

Eventually a teacher did catch me playing a game and sent me to the Deans office. He saw all the things I did to circumvent the schools internet filters that he asked if I would like to spend an elective period at the it office. I said yes. So for one period a day I would help students with basic things and I learned a lot from the other guys in the office. I got super into computers and now have a career built on that experience.