Mobile Ban In Schools Not Improving Grades or Behavior, Study Suggests (bbc.com) 94
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: Banning phones in schools is not linked to pupils getting higher grades or having better mental wellbeing, the first study of its kind suggests. Students' sleep, classroom behavior, exercise or how long they spend on their phones overall also seems to be no different for schools with phone bans and schools without, the academics found. But they did find that spending longer on smartphones and social media in general was linked with worse results for all of those measures.
The first study in the world to look at school phone rules alongside measures of pupil health and education feeds into a fierce debate that has played out in homes and schools in recent years. [...] The University of Birmingham's findings, peer-reviewed and published by the Lancet's journal for European health policy, compared 1,227 students and the rules their 30 different secondary schools had for smartphone use at break and lunchtimes. The schools were chosen from a sample of 1,341 mainstream state schools in England.
The paper says schools restricting smartphone use did not seem to be seeing their intended improvements on health, wellbeing and focus in lessons. However, the research did find a link between more time on phones and social media, and worse mental wellbeing and mental health, less physical activity, poorer sleep, lower grades and more disruptive classroom behavior. The study used the internationally recognized Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scales to determine participants' wellbeing. It also looked at students' anxiety and depression levels. Dr Victoria Goodyear, the study's lead author, told the BBC the findings were not "against" smartphone bans in schools, but "what we're suggesting is that those bans in isolation are not enough to tackle the negative impacts."
She said the "focus" now needed to be on reducing how much time students spent on their phones, adding: "We need to do more than just ban phones in schools."
The first study in the world to look at school phone rules alongside measures of pupil health and education feeds into a fierce debate that has played out in homes and schools in recent years. [...] The University of Birmingham's findings, peer-reviewed and published by the Lancet's journal for European health policy, compared 1,227 students and the rules their 30 different secondary schools had for smartphone use at break and lunchtimes. The schools were chosen from a sample of 1,341 mainstream state schools in England.
The paper says schools restricting smartphone use did not seem to be seeing their intended improvements on health, wellbeing and focus in lessons. However, the research did find a link between more time on phones and social media, and worse mental wellbeing and mental health, less physical activity, poorer sleep, lower grades and more disruptive classroom behavior. The study used the internationally recognized Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scales to determine participants' wellbeing. It also looked at students' anxiety and depression levels. Dr Victoria Goodyear, the study's lead author, told the BBC the findings were not "against" smartphone bans in schools, but "what we're suggesting is that those bans in isolation are not enough to tackle the negative impacts."
She said the "focus" now needed to be on reducing how much time students spent on their phones, adding: "We need to do more than just ban phones in schools."
Correlation... (Score:5, Funny)
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Well, considering recent events, the evidence is suggesting that this is not a recent problem, but a generational issue that predates mobile telephones.
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If cell telephones are not a vector, the only obvious deduction is that American kids are dumb as rocks.
And it's not going to get any better. https://www.nbcnews.com/politi... [nbcnews.com]
Re: Occams Razor. (Score:2)
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These are not american kids
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You're implying that the goal here is health or education. Even if neither of these are positively effected, anecdotally the cell phone ban has been hugely helpful in teaching massively reducing the amount of shit and arguments with kids and their parents in class by teachers. My wife is actively relieved now that cell phones are banned, this year has been much less stress than the previous one. Even if the little shits don't learn anything they are at the very least less disruptive.
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You're implying that the goal here is health or education. Even if neither of these are positively effected,
Right, the goal has never been health or education. The goal is to brutalize the children. Keep them away from technology, make them wear uniforms, and teach them to conform to arbitrary rules at every step.
By the way, you meant "affected", sweetie.
Re: Correlation... (Score:2)
Your grammar correction is hypocritical in light of the rest of your post.
Affect and effect have been largely hot swappable for a decade now. Everyone knows what was meant, the distinction is not useful, and language evolves. Any rule that requires drilling repeatedly to overcome instinctive behavior belongs in exactly the kinds of schools you were complaining about. Do you want training for rules or not?
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If you think expecting children to pay attention in school rather than sit and play with a phone, or lean to talk to others rather than sit and play with a phone, and the concept of wearing a uniform is "burtalizing" then YOU ARE THE PROBLEM.
Hmm... It appears parental discipline... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Starts in the HOME. Eh? Who knew. Except everyone for over a century ;-)
One reason schools are unwilling to deal with bullies is because the parents are also bullies... the kids learned that behaviour from somewhere.
Results confirmed in historic meta study (Score:5, Interesting)
A history meta study of academic papers on student engagement and disruption show that students were misbehaving and disrupting before smartphones.
"I just don't remember my classmates being disruptive and disrespectful to our elders, but I guess we were..." Said one scientist.
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Kids act out when they are bored. There are other reasons of course, but that's a big one. We have built our education approach around the desires of how adults want to teach rather than the ways children best learn (which change significantly based on age and gender).
For example, young boys tend to need a lot of exercise. If you don't give them that, all the pent-up energy will explode. This isn't because boys are terrible, it's because we are being stupid about how we teach them.
Another example: young
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We had plenty of ways to be disruptive little devils using just paper, pencils, rubber bands, gum, and straws (spit-wads).
One of my more interesting but strict teachers allowed us to draw "mean" pictures of them and pin them to a bulletin board. It gave angry or fidgety kids an outlet so they spent less time taking it out directly on the teacher. Seemed to work!
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Oh yeah, I remember that documentary [imdb.com]!
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Yep. And this has been known for a long time. There are 3000 year old clay tablets complaining about young people not behaving well.
My take is that quite a bit of this problem here may actually be with the teachers. Teach boringly and today students know they could spend their time better and get restless. Not that teachers were better before, but these days it has gotten more visible and hence requirements to be a good teacher has increased. As requirements to be good at anything have increased across the
Cellphones aren't the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Schrödinger's career (Score:4, Insightful)
If you go into a trade and you don't do very good they tell you you should have gone to college.
Whatever they do they never once let you even consider the possibility that there's a systemic problem outside your control.
The individual is always to blame. Never the system. Never question the system.
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If someone spends most of their life engaging with 6 second videos, LOL-cats videos, and 300-word messages, then a 45-minute lesson is exhausting. This is why reading fiction everyday, is a vital experience for children. Ideally, it is fiction where strange stuff happens: Fantasy and science-fiction are suitable although the magic in fantasy upsets some religious zealots.
There was always gossip in class, it tended to be a localized event with little consequences. Now gossip affects the entire age coho
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Also, the school day is only so long, and apparently at least 1.5 hours of it is spent on phones, texting and looking at social media. https://medicalxpress.com/news... [medicalxpress.com]
Overall time on phone (Score:5, Insightful)
If the kids are picking up the phones at the end of the school day and never setting them down until they're back in school, I don't see what effect it has on them other than leaving them listless and bored during the school day while they wait to get back their electronic devices. This is the equivalent of saying, "We don't allow employees to drink during working hours. We can't understand why they're still arriving drunk."
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alcohol ban in workplaces not improving livers or alcoholism!
yep, absolute bait
but surely /.ers are sharper than the septembers this toddler-grade ruse is meant to click farm and will see right through it
surely
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With regard to poor grades.. maybe the teachers shouldn't be poking at their phones during class either.
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I don't see what effect it has on them other than leaving them listless and bored during the school day while they wait to get back their electronic devices.
Anecdotally the the students are neither restless nor bored. Quite the opposite at my wife's school they note that students actually seem to play and be more active during the breaks rather than sit in silence death scrolling tiktoks, and even if they don't learn anything extra they are less disruptive in class rather than more (if they were restless).
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I listened to the broadcast version of this report rather than RTFA, and this point was made (verbally).
Never having tried to program a phone ... is it feasible to create an application (possibly a system-level application ; needing passwords to install or modify it) that prevents the phone form charging while it is switched on? So the user has to take a break for extended periods duri
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I listened to the broadcast version of this report rather than RTFA, and this point was made (verbally).
Never having tried to program a phone ... is it feasible to create an application (possibly a system-level application ; needing passwords to install or modify it) that prevents the phone form charging while it is switched on? So the user has to take a break for extended periods during the day (24h).
Assuming the parents are buying the phone for the kids (not a parent, not my problem), then installing or enabling this behaviour while setting up the other "parental controls" at the store should be default behaviour. Even making it the factory-supplied option for "parents and children" family account deals (again ; never spent a second looking at such deals).
MAC-locking the home wifi might help too [parent] You want data, you use this phone! [child] But I have to go to sleep while it charges. [parent] And the problem is ?
The spoiled little rich bastards who can afford to buy their own phone and data plan are a different problem. Their parent's problem.
There is a parental program some phones implement that allows for set amounts of time on the device before it has to sit for a prescribed amount of time. Either parents don't know about it, or the kids whining a little bit gets it turned off for the most part.
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Sounds like something that could be (1) implemented in the factory, so it can be removed with a hammer weighing at least 5 kg, and (2) more widely advertised to parents and/ or schools.
As Douglas Adams once said "someone else's problem".
Addiction FTW. (Score:4, Insightful)
Study finds an 8-hour school break 5 days a week isn’t near enough to cure smartphone junkies of their addiction.
Turns out an 8-hour work break 5 days a week for adults has never cured anyone of alcohol or drug addiction either.
Now maybe we can stop fucking around and call this problem what it is so we can start treating it properly instead of placating all the addicts involved.
(Yeah, I’m talking to you, parent.)
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Re:Addiction FTW. (Score:5, Insightful)
[I] never would have expected technology to be the downfall of humanity simply because it's addictive to our fragile social minds.
It isn't. Rephrase your conclusion: I never would have expected the hammer to be the cause of so many blunt-force murders. It's a tool, and the tool doesn't make people do anything. This mindset of blaming the tool has been going on since before any our parents were a gleam in our grandparents' eyes, and it really needs to stop. The real issue (whatever it is) is far more nuanced and multifaceted (it always is).
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Social media is a tool for a job that doesn't need doing though, unless you are a wealth sucking megacorp, that is.
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i miss the 80's and 90's when a star trek future really seemed likely.
The 80's where medium range nuclear weapons (cruise, Pershing, and RSD-10/SS-20) were deployed across Europe? The 80's where "The Earth Dies Screaming", "99 Red Balloons", "Einstein A Go-Go", and "Planet Earth" were in the charts? I'd much rather some distracted kids than imminent nuclear annihilation. Everything looks better in the rear view mirror, especially when you know how it subsequently turned out. I'm betting some people will yearn wistfully for the 2020's (except for having their phones taken aw
Studies find slashdotters (Score:2)
Children are being forced to rely on cell phones for socializing and human interaction because our suburban cities isolate them physically and emotionally. When you build everything around cars and the assumption that the only people that matter are people who own cars and have unlimited acces
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Here in European cities built around walking, kids are just as addicted, so your theory doesn't hold water.
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Meanwhile, if a child is spotted anywhere not within immediate view of a parent, it gets treated as the crime of the century, leaving the kids only their smartphone as a way to socialize. Now the same crazies are coming to take away their smartphones too...
Re: Addiction FTW. (Score:2)
Re: Addiction FTW. (Score:2)
Zukerberg in front of Congress to answer questions a few years ago ? Harmful to kids? Not ringing any bells?
Social media does meet accepted
clinical definitions of addictive.
First step is ban the tracking (Score:2)
Eliminate the financial incentives that drives these algorithms.
Focus (Score:2, Insightful)
She said the "focus" now needed to be on reducing how much time students spent on their phones, adding: "We need to do more than just ban phones in schools."
How about you do your damn job as an educator, and "focus" on educating children?
Education administrators loves witch hunts against anything that seems like it *might* (or, as this study suggested, don't) impact education. The history of education its *filled* with admins freaking out over hair styles, fashion styles, slang terms, etc. ... all of which were falsely blamed for declining pedagogy.
An admninistrator's job is to educate children based on the best scientific information available. If there isn'
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Gah, why doesn't slashdot give you a couple minutes of edit window? :( That should have been:
Education administrators love witch hunts against anything that seems ...
and:
The history of education is *filled* with
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Your withering remarks would have a lot more force if you hadn't demonstrated your own inability to master basic comprehension:
1. The quote was not from an administrator or educator, it was from the lead researcher. Researching this stuff is literally her "doing [her] job"
2. Neither she nor anyone else connected directly to this study is "wasting" your "tax dollars" because this was a *British* study
Maybe you should be spending less time on Slashdot and more time learning how to read texts closely
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How about you do your damn job as an educator, and "focus" on educating children?
Oh you're one of THOSE people who think education occurs in fixed 8 hours intervals during Monday to Friday. I feel sorry for any kids you attempt to raise. Maybe let educators do their job even if you don't understand how or why.
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She said the "focus" now needed to be on reducing how much time students spent on their phones, adding: "We need to do more than just ban phones in schools."
How about you do your damn job as an educator, and "focus" on educating children?
Education administrators loves witch hunts against anything that seems like it *might* (or, as this study suggested, don't) impact education. The history of education its *filled* with admins freaking out over hair styles, fashion styles, slang terms, etc. ... all of which were falsely blamed for declining pedagogy.
An admninistrator's job is to educate children based on the best scientific information available. If there isn't solid evidence that _____ helps kids learn, administrators should not be wasting our tax dollars on ____.
Firstly, educators would love to but people like you keep insisting on having your say on what can be taught and getting lawmakers to interfere in school policies based entirely on whinging parents.
Secondly, the study was based in the UK, schools are run differently over here. Administrators are educators, a headmaster or mistress usually comes from long serving teaching staff... Also it's "pounds", not "dollars" and we refer to it as "public money" rather than "tax" pounds... And finding what works or d
Science is science even if it isn't intuitive (Score:2)
Sometimes after the research is done, we get an non-intuitive result.
Now we can use these results to make policy and rules better for the students, or we can just double down on our own view and stick our heads in the sand, and just push what we think will help despite the data.
That said while as an old guy, who went to school before everyone had cell phones. Heck in my under grad, I was one of the few students with a cell phone that just made calls (it did text too, but I had no one else to text to, plus
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Sometimes after the research is done, we get an non-intuitive result.
Non-intuitive to whom? It was blindingly obvious from the start, and has been since before cell phone were invented. The issue is far deeper than cell phone use, which is nothing more than an unavoidable symptom of a systemic societal problem. The problem starts with the societally-enforced breakup of the family, and all the problems that follow are inevitable.
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The problem starts with the societally-enforced breakup of the family, and all the problems that follow are inevitable.
Have any evidence for that? No? I didn't think so.
Just to make your tiny little head explode... [theatlantic.com]
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I can't help but ask - what "societally-enforced breakup of the family" are you referring to?
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Who are you to say what the study should or snould not focus on? Maybe that's what you're interested in, but at least here in the UK, there has been an enormous amount of noise about whether students' educational attainment and mental health is affected by use of smartphones in school, so a study showing that bans do sweet fuck all to improve either is quite significant here. For example, my daughter's school just last term made all the girls put their phones in stupid fucking Yonder pouches in the morning,
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I'd also like to point out that "do the students enjoy school and each other more" is a subset of "mental wellbeing", "Can they pay more attention in class" is a precursor to "higher grades", and "Can they appreciate their present more" is a subset of mental wellbeing and a precursor of "higher grades", so why you think the proxy or intermediate metrics you've suggested are categorically different from the outcome metrics mentioned in the study is beyond me.
The exposure/outcome needs to be flipped (Score:2)
When you go to rehab, they don't tell you to stop doing drugs for 3 hours a day. Kids sitting on their phones in class is a symptom, not a cause.
If we really wanted to get back to the old levels of concentration (for an arbitrary definition of "old") we need to get rid of the addiction sources. That means no more Youtube, TikTok, Instagram, Bluesky/Twitter/Threads, and whatever else has popped up. Then add in physical activity in the morning every day, and we will be back to some semblance of concentration
Re: The exposure/outcome needs to be flipped (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, my read is that the idea of doing things is now considered icky.. too much work. So other than doing sports
So, why bother doing things?
Small study, wonder about length, too. (Score:1)
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The article tells you exactly who funded it. If you're trying ot imply funding bias, that's pretty fucking pathetic to do that without even providing a rationale for why the funder, in this case the Public Health Research Programme, National Institute for Health and Care Research, Department of Health and Social Care, UK, would exhibit any kind of funding bias. FWIW, I think there's basically zero funding bias. The Department of Health has absolutely no direct skin in the game when it comes to whether or no
getting rid of their mobiles is only half (Score:2)
No shit Sherlock (Score:3, Insightful)
You take a kid and you drop him in a suburb with extremely low density so it's difficult for them to find a friend group that isn't a 30 minute to an hour drive away.
Then you act all freaking surprised when they do all their socializing over telecommunications. Before internet and smartphones we complained about them being on the telephone all day long.
It's even worse now because it used to be when they hit 15 or 16 you could at least get them a cheap beater car but those don't really exist anymore. Unless you're a competent mechanic and willing to spend a lot of your Saturdays working on automobiles and you've got money lying around for parts then you're looking at at least 6 to 7 grand to buy the kind of beater I used to be able to get for $500. If you're on this website you're old enough to know the type. Something you could drive for about 6 months before it was ready for the junkyard but for 500 bucks that was good enough to
Since those don't exist anymore and never mind the fact that insurance for a teenager is going to be like 150 a month You've got a large swath of kids who don't even get to get a car until they're in their late teens or early twenties and need one for work.
Basically it's like that meme of why don't kids go outside anymore and then there's a picture of the outside and it's a built up city completely given over to cars and completely useless to pedestrians...
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Umm, I think you missed the part in TFS where this was a British study. I doubt they've suddenly decided to adopt US car culture during the era of the smartphone, so these kids aren't doing poorly in their studies because they can't afford a beater car.
It boils down to a question of whether smartphones truly are worse than video games, TV, rock music, comic books, or anything else that was previously demonized as "destroying the minds of our youth" in the past. Even if these devices do turn out to be more
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Outside of London we have some of the worst public transport in Europe.
Anything at all which doesn't give compete primacy to cars is claimed to be a war on drivers by all the usual idiots and since both parties are shit scared of the daily fail, that means they bend the knee.
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This is the UK mate, there are no "suburbs" of which you speak.
Kids in our suburbs just go out, walk for all of 5 mins and meet their mates at the shops and parks etc.
US suburbs are miles away from anything.
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Do phone bans work (Score:2)
Do students comply with phone bans? My experience with my own children says overwhelming no. I can reach my son basically all throughout the school day on his phone.
More importantly, the schools mandate internet usage as part of the curriculum. Is banning use of the internet via a phone useful given that students are forced to use the internet on a different device?
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Schools often use Yondr pouches which doesn't make phone use impossible, but does increase the frictional cost substantially. You need to do things like have a second phone hidden away or try to defeat the magnet.
Many schools give their pupils tablets or laptops for use.
These rules are really about trying to socially engineer how kids interact at break time. It's a stupid moral panic. My own daughter's school claimed it would stop bullying, which was just bonkers: as though bullies need phones and as though
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> Do students comply with phone bans?
Up to the school to make sure they do. It's not like they need them at school in the first place, let alone it being questionable why a kid has a phone in any context, so they could just leave them at home.
> can reach my son basically all throughout the school day on his phone.
Thats part of the problem. Why? I mean if all other generations of kids happily got along without any phones, why start giving them to them now?
Just give them a feature phone, SMS and call
Students stay on their phones at home (Score:2)
That's because the pupils spend their entire home life on their phones.
Umm, Whut? The Study Says it Works... (Score:1)
Right there in TFS it says
"However, the research did find a link between more time on phones and social media, and worse mental wellbeing and mental health, less physical activity, poorer sleep, lower grades and more disruptive classroom behavior. "
I mean... so, if MORE time on phones leads to WORSE outcomes, then... less time on phones leads to better outcomes? Isn't that how it works?
Anyway, I don't give an [explative] what this study says, let me tell you about my experience in the ONE MONTH that our school has been implementing a cell phone ban (enforced with Yonder pouches). It's been incredible. I feel like a weight has lifted off my shoulders when EVERY DAY I would battle the students and their phones EVERY SINGLE CL
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Reducing phone usage in daily life = some effect.
Duh (Score:2)
Total ban! (Score:1)
Er, what? (Score:2)
The bans are too young. Christ, did they really expect a sudden reversal or something.
I doesnt take a rocket scientist to work out that any benefits will take time. Those kids already have brains wired differently due to social media, you should be looking 1, then 2 then 3 years AFTER the ban to see a result if any, not a few months!
You will see most difference in kids that NEVER got into that habbit in the first place.
It's like banning unhealthy snacks at school and testing the students BMI etc a couple
Ban advocates are so fucking oblivious (Score:2)
Teachers and policy-makers who push for this have no idea how they come across to young people. God knows, I'm not a young person myself, but I do have the wit to listen to my kids about what they tell me about their lives. And these ban advocates come across as performative buffoons to young people: fighting a problem that isn't really there with an ineffective and capricious toolkit, while ignoring much worse issues and of course, instituting rules for thee and not for me. My daughter's soon-to-be ex-scho
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I will admit you make some good points, here and elsewhere in this discussion, but...
I do have the wit to listen to my kids about what they tell me about their lives. And these ban advocates come across as performative buffoons to young people: fighting a problem that isn't really there with an ineffective and capricious toolkit
As is said in pretty much every attempt to tackle addiction, "the first step in fixing the problem is admitting that there is a problem". That your kids tell you there's no problem with them being on their phones doesn't make it so*. Recently I decided to go back to university, and every weekday now sit in lecture theatres with large numbers of 18 year olds - and I can tell you that a significant proportion of these 'adults
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Thank you for the thoughtful reply. When I said “a problem that isn’t really there”, you seem to have inferred I meant the problem of addictive behaviour in relation to phones (among young people). However, what I was referring to was the apparent problem of pupils using their phones while in school in ways that harm their health and educational attainment.
The reason that my kids say that problem doesn’t really exist, and the reason I believe them, is that phone use was already forbi
Welcome to the real world.... (Score:2)
It is almost as if children need help and structured learning to gain the skills necessary to handle distracting and even addictive things in the wider world, and to help them deal with life as an independent adult.
It's almost as if life doesn't begin and end at the start and end of the school day, and almost like parents and schools need to teach life skills as well as how to pass academic tests.
It's also quite a lot that people now need mobile Internet access to lead their lives as adults, and the closer
What about integration? (Score:1)