Are School Phone Restriction Policies Working?

Over the past few years, more than 20 U.S. states and dozens of countries have adopted laws or policies intended to separate students from their phones during school — one of the first large-scale attempts to reverse part of the digital transformation of the school day. This recent and widespread policy shift allows the examination of whether removing access to smartphones improves how students learn, focus, interact and behave.

The Tech and Society Lab at NYU Stern, led by Professor Jonathan Haidt and Senior Research Scientist Zachary Rausch, released a new working paper reviewing the available evidence. The research focused in particular on natural experiments that allow the researchers to compare what happens before and after schools restrict student phone use. In short, the studies primarily found either beneficial effects or neutral effects, with few negative effects. The effects on test scores were particularly promising -contrary to recent headlines-especially in cases where phone use actually declined in schools.

The highlights of the working paper focus on points that the researchers believe have been missed in most of the recent news about phone-free schools:

• Many headlines have overlooked or given little attention to study findings that found positive impacts on test scores and academic performance
• Schools care about much more than just test scores, and future studies should therefore examine the effects of phone-free school policies on a much broader range of outcomes
• Taken together, the evidence suggests that removing phones from the school day is a promising first step in addressing declining student performance and other challenges schools are facing, and it should be considered one part of a broader set of policies and initiatives

The latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test scores, which assess the extent to which 15-year-old students across the globe have acquired key knowledge and skills essential for full participation in social and economic life, showed the lowest average performances ever recorded. While Haidt and Rausch do not know to what degree these declines are due to smartphones in pockets, tablets and laptops at schools, the first years of the COVID epidemic, or the impact of AI on students, there is a growing set of experiments to analyze as schools, states, provinces, and nations implement phone-free school policies. These experiments provide data that can inform insights as to whether phone restriction policies alter outcomes in beneficial ways, and whether other new technology policies should be considered.

This piece was adapted from a post that originally appeared on After Babel.