Phones are distracting students in class. More states are pressing schools to ban them

MicroWave@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 76 points – Phones are distracting students in class. More states are pressing schools to ban them
nbcnews.com

In California, a high school teacher complains that students watch Netflix on their phones during class. In Maryland, a chemistry teacher says students use gambling apps to place bets during the school day.

Around the country, educators say students routinely send Snapchat messages in class, listen to music and shop online, among countless other examples of how smartphones distract from teaching and learning.

The hold that phones have on adolescents in America today is well-documented, but teachers say parents are often not aware to what extent students use them inside the classroom. And increasingly, educators and experts are speaking with one voice on the question of how to handle it: Ban phones during classes.

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On the other hand, this is how we know about teachers doing things they absolutely shouldn't do.

I read books in class. I drew pictures in class. I just looked out the window and daydreamed. Kids aren't going to pay attention just because you take away their phones.

EDIT: I'm honestly amazed people are against that. Are you not aware that this is why we have videos like this that expose racist teachers?

https://abc7.com/fontana-sequoia-middle-school-teacher-racial-slur/13092208/

Exactly. If a student doesn't want to pay attention, it won't.

I think the exposing teachers part is even more important. I edited my post to show a link to a student who filmed a teacher being racist above.

Here's another link to another incident to show that isn't a one-off

https://www.kansascity.com/news/state/missouri/article275311416.html

I got all kinds of mistreatment by teachers in school and saw even worse stuff happen to other kids. Racism, sexual harassment, violent threats, etc. But we didn't have phones with cameras in them back in the early 90s, so they got away with it. They can't anymore... unless they ban phones, of course.

EDIT: I don't suppose one of the many downvoters would take the time to explain why giving children the ability to expose teachers like this should be taken away from them in the name of getting kids to pay attention.

EDIT: I don’t suppose one of the many downvoters would take the time to explain why giving children the ability to expose teachers like this should be taken away from them in the name of getting kids to pay attention.

To give you a genuine response, it is at least conceivable that the potential harm caused by allowing students with adolescent brains constant access to platforms that are explicitly and intentionally designed to be as addictive and distracting as possible is greater than the positive impact of outing the occasional bigoted teacher.

I'm not saying this is definitively the case because I'm neither a sociologist nor a psychologist, but I think it's fair to say that we can objectively state that this is at least possible.

If it is because people think it's occasional, I hope they've changed their minds now that I've posted 7 links. 5 of them I found within a few minutes of searching (all five in total, not each). The other two I found instantly.

Because I disagree entirely that this potential harm is worse than the actual harm on these videos.

I don't think throwing any amount of links at each other is a particularly productive way of answering the question. I can just as easily find an equal number of reports from teachers saying how keeping kids off their phones is nearly impossible and makes it much harder to actually teach. Plenty of teachers would strongly disagree that social media is merely a 'potential' harm.

Reports from teachers vs. actual video evidence are not really comparable, are they?

Because the former goes back to the old problem of their words against the child's, which is exactly why cameras are helpful.

If there is actually data backing up what those teachers claim, fine. But otherwise we're talking about subjective claims vs. objective video, the latter exposing activity that should be a firing offense at least if not necessitating criminal charges.

Sure thing, here's some random studies.

https://www.edweek.org/leadership/digital-distractions-in-class-linked-to-lower-academic-performance/2023/12

About two-thirds of U.S. students reported that they get distracted by using digital devices, and about 54 percent said they get distracted by other students who are using those resources, the PISA results found.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5648953/

The main findings of the study were that 67% of students were distracted by use of cell phones and 21% of them were extremely disturbed and it affected their learning.

https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1350.pdf

We find that following a ban on phone use, student test scores improve by 6.41% of a standard deviation. Our results indicate that there are no significant gains in student performance if a ban is not widely complied with. Furthermore, this effect is driven by the most disadvantaged and underachieving pupils. Students in the lowest quartile of prior achievement gain 14.23% of a standard deviation, whilst, students in the top quartile are neither positively nor negatively affected by a phone ban. The results suggest that low-achieving students are more likely to be distracted by the presence of mobile phones, while high achievers can focus in the classroom regardless of the mobile phone policy. This also implies that any negative externalities from phone use do not impact on the high achieving students. Schools could significantly reduce the education achievement gap by prohibiting mobile phone use in schools.

Students themselves report phones being significantly distracting, including to other people that aren't using them, and there's even evidence that banning phones directly increases student performance, especially amongst low-performing students.

How does this compare against the benefits of exposing teacher bigotry? I won't pretend to know how to quantify that, but I'm not making the positive claim that banning phones is necessarily worth the loss of ability to expose teachers. My only point is that it is plausible that this is the case, and I think I've supplied decent evidence for that. Policy questions very rarely are between "good option" and "bad option", but rather "bad option" vs "worse option".

I guess the main question is if a digital device is inherently distracting or if the issue is how it is used. Also at a certain point a distraction is a tool that can be used for learning too.

I was a privileged kid in a private highschool we didn't have smart phones yet (they came out when I was in college) but we did have laptops in class.

At first we had full Internet access via WiFi. Then the school slowly started to filter traffic by blocking certain sites. So naturally I learned for to install a proxy on Firefox so I could go to addictinggames.com during the especially boring parts of class. I would still take notes (enough to pass all my classes) and some teachers were so entertaining that I never wanted to do anything but pay attention.

Eventually a teacher did catch me playing a game and sent me to the Deans office. He saw all the things I did to circumvent the schools internet filters that he asked if I would like to spend an elective period at the it office. I said yes. So for one period a day I would help students with basic things and I learned a lot from the other guys in the office. I got super into computers and now have a career built on that experience.

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I'm bored and could use the downvotes, so here are a bunch more examples of students filming teachers doing things that are unacceptable or just plain illegal in class because they have their phones:

https://www.wdbo.com/news/news/local/student-films-teacher-whipping-students-belt/nmJzW/

https://www.9news.com.au/world/special-needs-student-films-teacher-s-abuse/5d513c71-22ec-4fc6-9da3-04b72d875a6d

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/student-teacher-qanon-video-shouting-b1951071.html

https://www.yourtango.com/news/video-math-teacher-mimicking-native-american-culture

https://www.yourtango.com/news/california-teacher-robert-bean-threatening-slam-student-against-wall

Wow, that math one! They did the same thing in my kid's math class! It was during Covid, so the teacher recorded it himself without a second thought! I couldn't believe what I was seeing!

I hear what you're saying about recording. But Im not sure phones in class are the answer.

I don't know what other answer there is to stop teachers getting away with this shit. The racism and sexual harassment I saw on display when I was going to school in Indiana in the 80s and 90s was not a secret. But since it was always the teacher's word against the kid's, the teacher always got away with it. The only time I can think of that it didn't happen was when a very devoted girl and her family in my high school spent a lot of time and money in court suing a teacher who sexually harassed her in middle school. He had his job the whole time (he was finally fired when he lost the case).

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