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Phones are distracting students in class. More states are pressing schools to ban them
(www.nbcnews.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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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
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5648953/
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1350.pdf
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.