Teenagers spend more than an hour on their smartphones during a typical school day, mostly on social media apps, concludes a new study.
The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA, on Jan. 5, found that 13- to 18-year-olds spent an average of 70 minutes on their smartphones during the school day.
Social media apps accounted for the greatest share of students’ smartphone use during school hours, with teens spending nearly 30 minutes per day on these platforms, the study found. Video and gaming apps followed, with nearly 15 minutes each.
At least 33 states and the District of Columbia require school districts to ban or restrict students’ use of cellphones in schools, according to an Education Week tally. In current legislative sessions, a few states are looking to strengthen or expand existing restrictions, while others are looking to establish them for the first time.
Kurt Seiler, the principal of Independence High School in Independence, Kan., said the findings aren’t surprising, but they’re still concerning.
Kansas is not among the states with existing cellphone restrictions, but Seiler’s school has a policy that says students are only allowed to use their phones during their 30-minute lunch period or the five minutes between classes. So if Seiler were to generalize the study’s findings to his school, that would mean students are on their phones during parts of instructional time, too.
That’s time that “takes away from engagement. It takes away from learning,” he said. “It’s a distraction.”
Kansas lawmakers recently introduced a bipartisan bill that would mandate districts to restrict student cellphone use during school hours, including lunch and passing periods.
Students spend the most time on social media apps
The researchers wanted to understand how much time students spend on their phones and what they’re using them for during school hours, said Jason Nagata, the lead researcher of the study and a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco.
They used data from the nationwide Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, a longitudinal project following thousands of preteens to understand their brain development. As part of the ABCD Study, some teens agreed to have their phone use analyzed.
Teens were asked to install an app on their phones called the Effortless Assessment Research System. Between September 2022 and May 2024, the app collected data on the time students spent on their phones and which apps they were using.
The researchers found:
- Teens spent an average of about five hours on their smartphones per day, nearly two hours of which was spent on social media.
- During the school day, teens spent 70 minutes on their smartphones, with nearly 30 minutes spent on social media.
- Teens spent about 15 minutes on video apps, such as YouTube, and roughly the same amount of time on gaming apps, such as Roblox and Pokemon GO.
- 16- to 18-year-olds spent more time on their phones (one hour) than 13- to 15-year-olds (40 minutes). Black teens spent more time on their phones (84 minutes) compared with their peers. And teens from lower-income households spent 12 to 20 additional minutes per day on smartphones during school hours compared with teens from higher-income households.
(Because of challenges in analyzing the numbers by app, the study’s findings only include data from Android phone users, according to the researchers).
“Assuming you have seven hours in a typical school day, 70 minutes is one-tenth of that,” Nagata said. “In general, kids should be actively engaged in class, so I do think it’s a significant portion of the school day in which kids are on their phones.”
Some people have argued that smartphones can be used for educational purposes, but Nagata said the findings show that students rarely use the devices for education or productivity apps.
“It’s possible they were using some of this phone time during lunch or recess or breaks,” said Nagata, who is also a pediatrician at Benioff Children’s Hospital in San Francisco. “But I still think it’s important that kids, during breaks, have time to rest, to have face-to-face social interactions with their peers, and also just be outdoors and physically active.”
Teens need skills to manage phone use
Schools and districts should ensure they have student buy-in for any policies about smartphone restrictions, Nagata said.
“Teenagers are very tech-savvy,” he said. “If they don’t believe in the policy, or if they don’t see how it might help their learning or well-being, there are often ways they can get around the rules.”
Seiler, the principal of Independence High, said principals also need to ensure that the whole school is implementing the policies consistently and that teachers have the support they need, not just to police the policy but also to have lessons so engaging that kids won’t feel the need to check their phones.
Teens also need more than a policy, Nagata said. They need to learn the skills to manage and balance their technology use, because after high school, they’re unlikely to live and work in environments that have phone bans.
“It’s not necessarily that teens are doing anything wrong,” he said. “These technologies have addictive features that are built into the system, that promote engagement, that are designed to keep us on them.”
