cell phones should be allowed in school essay pdf

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Do phones belong in schools.

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Harvard Staff Writer

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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Weighing the Costs and Benefits of Cellphones in Schools

• Posted August 10, 2022
• By Emily Boudreau
• K-12 System Leadership
• Teachers and Teaching
• Technology and Media

Typically, the discussion around cellphones in school — whether they are learning tools or distractions — has revolved around their impact on measures of academic success like test scores or grades. But in his research, Ed School alum Dylan Lukes looks at other outcomes policymakers should be considering.

“I’m hoping to move beyond thinking about test scores and consider the potential importance of other outcomes like discipline and school culture which may factor into student wellbeing,” says Lukes, Ph.D.’22.

As schools are gearing up for the fall, with some considering new and amended policies on the use of cellphones in class, Luke gets into his findings — including how the New York City Department of Education’s (NYCDOE) recently reversed cellphone ban impacted student suspensions and school culture — and gives his thoughts on what schools and districts should be considering when creating policies around technology moving forward. 

Why are cellphones in schools such a contested topic among educators, parents, and students? The motivation for many of these policies comes from a desire to limit distractions. If you think about it, from a school’s perspective, if a cellphone ban can improve student learning, that’s a great low-cost intervention with a favorable benefit-cost ratio. However, from a parent’s perspective, the calculus is a bit different, and the cost of not being able to get a hold of their kid(s) may outweigh any potential benefit accrued from the ban. 

How have cellphone policies evolved over the years? Over the past several decades, many large urban school districts have intermittently experimented with cellphone bans. However, most cellphone bans have been repealed due to their unpopularity with parents and students and concerns over equity [ as low income students often have mobile-only access to the internet ]. In March 2015, the NYCDOE lifted their longstanding districtwide cellphone ban and provided schools with significant discretion in designing and implementing school-level policies governing student cellphone use — and that shift is what I explore in my research.

Most research around cellphone use in schools looks at the impact on test scores, reaction time, and the ability to focus. You look instead at two areas: discipline and a sense of safety.  The existing studies provide evidence that allowing phones in the classroom negatively impacts test scores and long-term learning retention. There are some correlational studies that suggest negative relationships between off-task device use and student achievement. Further, in psychology, research on multitasking generally finds negative effects on learning and task completion and, more generally, research has shown that cellphones distract and negatively impact reaction times, performance, enjoyment of focal tasks, and cognitive capacity.

In my research, my thinking was that as schools consider removal of bans or enforcement, they should also consider often overlooked dimensions of school culture that could play a role in educational productivity and student wellbeing. That is not to say academic achievement is not important — it is — but there are other potentially important inputs that contribute to educational productivity such as school discipline and culture.  

Why? From a disciplinary standpoint, if the school has a cellphone ban and there are students breaking that cellphone ban, it’s possible that over time — and I’ve seen this from survey responses from NYCDOE school principals and parent coordinators — at some point there can be some punitive measures if you’re caught breaking that ban. That’s one of the reasons I explore the impact on discipline and suspension — you could be using a cellphone which, yes, could be distracting, but even more negatively, have the student removed from school. That kind of impact on learning could be a net-negative, even when you consider that against the positive effects a cellphone ban may have on a student’s learning and their peers’ learning. 

I also think it’s important to look at other factors we don’t typically think about, like school culture, that might also have a big impact on learning. 

And what did you find? So just as a disclaimer, there might be policies I can’t control for that impact these outcomes. For example, in 2014, there was a new chancellor [in New York] who made changes to the discipline code. With that caveat, I do find that the ban removal positively impacted school discipline but had negative impacts on student perception of school culture across the dimensions of respect, student behavior, and school safety. It also had negative impacts on teacher perception of school safety. My findings suggest an improvement in educational productivity due to the NYCDOE’s ban removal. But there’s a tradeoff — a cost to school culture. 

What do you mean by safety? When it comes to emergencies, students likely feel safer having access to a phone. But the day-in and day-out component of school safety is how students use phones within school. This might include things like bullying, harassment, videotaping, and posting to social media. Those are reasons why having phones within schools could potentially be accelerators of negative student behavior. These safety measures which look at how safe students feel in classrooms, hallways, locker rooms, cafeterias, show a pretty negative jump after the ban has been lifted, which suggest to me that having a phone is at least interrupting a student’s ability to safely navigate those spaces.

So what should policymakers think about moving forward? This is just the tip of the iceberg. It would be interesting to look at how cellphones further contribute to school culture using more robust measures across time. And to be clear, I don’t think there’s anything inherently bad about cellphones but I do think it’s key to engage in a discussion around the tradeoffs of having them in schools and classrooms. There might be some interesting ways to balance the tradeoffs of their distractions and their benefits — something like having magnetized pouches and allowing students to take out cellphones under special circumstances (e.g., class activity, lunch). Some schools are already experimenting with these alternatives and there are some prime opportunities in this space to evaluate impacts of these polices on educational outcomes, including school discipline and school culture. 

The latest research, perspectives, and highlights from the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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