New Study: Cell Phone Bans Improve Learning — Largely by Reducing Absenteeism
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses a new study showing that phone bans improve academic outcomes, with a surprising mechanism: students actually come to school more when phones are banned.
Key Takeaways
- Phone bans reduce absenteeism - Students attend school more when phones are banned, likely because school becomes more social and engaging
- The learning gains follow from attendance - Better outcomes come partly from students being present more, not just less distracted
- A clever research design - The study isolated the effect of phone bans from other variables, strengthening the causal claim
Transcript
Does banning cell phones increase student learning?
Well, according to a new study that's out today, the answer is yes.
And the mechanisms are really interesting.
And how they figured this out was really surprising and really intriguing to me.
What the researchers did is they looked at how much students were on their phones.
in schools before and after the ban.
And you wouldn't think that there was a really reliable way to do that, but they used commercial tracking, the kind of service that advertisers use to figure out who to run ads to and how many people are at a shopping center, things like that.
They used that type of data to actually measure how much kids are on their phones during the school day.
And they found that the ban actually significantly cut down by roughly half how much kids were on their phones during the school day.
And this is not self-report data.
This is not teacher report data.
This is like how many kids are actually checking their phones how many times throughout the day as measured through the cell phone networks.
And this is a really cool kind of data that we don't normally have because normally we only have data when kids get caught, right?
You have data when kids get suspended or expelled.
Anything less severe than that, we might not have any big data on at all.
And of course, there's no data if the student never gets caught.
Well, this is different.
And this allowed researchers to figure out that it actually does make a measurable difference on standardized test scores when schools ban phones.
Students learn more.
What was also interesting is one of the mechanisms was not just that kids weren't as distracted by their phones and being on their phones as much, but one of the mechanisms was that absenteeism went down.
And let me know if you have any theories about this.
I'm not exactly sure why absenteeism would go down if we ban phones but one thing that comes to mind is like maybe students are actually getting more out of school and they realize it and they're learning more and they're enjoying it more and they're more likely to show up let me know what you think