Countless districts, states, and even entire countries have announced and tried to implement such bans. After a few semesters with these policies, researchers have had sufficient time to study their effects. And results from those studies are starting to roll in. Most recently, researcher Sara Abrahamson surveyed Norwegian schools to determine if and when they. Implemented a phone ban and linked that to Norwegian Registry data, which includes “information on each. Individual’s educational institution, health care take-up at specialist care, including psychologists, and general practitioners (GPs), middle-school grades set by students’ teachers and externally corrected exams, student’s overall GPA, and individuals’ choices of academic or vocational high schools.”
Schools implemented restrictions at different
Times, and Abrahamsson demonstrates Croatia Phone Number List that the implementation of smartphone bans was uncorrelated with either school characteristics such as teacher gender ratios or prior achievement, and uncorrelated with prior trends such as declining mental health or GPAs. These factors allowed for a quasi-experimental design, analyzing 477 middle schools between 2010 and 2018. From this analysis, she comes to five conclusions: Banning smartphones reduces the number of consultations for psychological symptoms by about 2–3 visits per child, per year. Banning smartphones lowers the incidence of bullying for both girls and boys. Banning smartphones results in girls making gains in both their GPA and externally graded mathematics exams, on the order of 0.22 standard deviations.
For comparison
Abrahamsson notes that reducing class China Phone Number List size by one student correlates to an improvement of about 0.00–0.05 standard deviations. These benefits are particularly strong for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds. The effects are particularly strong at schools with the strictest bans, requiring students to hand in or lock away their phones, not just place them on silent mode. Abrahamsson notes that, even on silent mode, phones can still pull at a student’s attention, distracting them as they wonder if someone messaged them, liked their status, or whatever else. This study comes as researchers debate the broader effects of social media on teenagers. In previous years, it’s become more and more evident that social media is, in fact, a major cause of declining adolescent mental health. Even so, there’s still much debate over how significant of a driver they are and what’s to be done about them.