As educators and politicians alike call for reigning in students’ cellphone use in schools, an important question remains unanswered: What approach works best?
Because this issue is so new, there’s little research on the most effective policies. Should schools ban cellphones from bell-to-bell? Or instead allow students’ access to their devices while focusing on educating them about healthy tech habits?
Research on how cellphone policies work in schools in the United States is especially hard to find. So, Education Week asked Adam McCready, an assistant professor in residence at the University of Connecticut’s Department of Educational Leadership, to share some of the early findings from a study he currently is working on.
For his study, McCready is evaluating the effects of cellphone policies (or lack thereof) in four middle schools in Connecticut. One school has no formal cellphone policy, one requires students to lock their phones up all day, one is implementing a digital literacy curriculum, and the fourth one is both storing phones for the whole school day and using a digital literacy curriculum.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What do your early findings show about cellphone policies?
We have some preliminary findings. I share these cautiously, because they’re pretty early. In the school we’re looking at that has [an all-day cellphone] prohibition, [but] no [digital literacy] education, we didn’t really see phones out through the day. [But] we did see students in front of us misusing school technology to play online video games. We saw students using Google Docs to write notes back and forth to one another. They still have devices in front of them throughout the school day.
At the dismissal, what was notable is that as students get dismissed, they unlock their phones, and then the first thing they do is they’re head down in the phone walking out of the school. So behavior changes at end of the day.
We’re going to continue to look at [this] in our data: yes, the phones change behavior during the school day, but it’s likely doing little to address behavior outside of school. And those behaviors then bleed into and affect the school day. If students are still getting bullied through social media in the evening, that still has an effect on students regardless.
What are the pros and cons of state-level cellphone policies for schools?
Frankly, there’s not a lot of scholarship out there at this point in time on this topic. I do think that these prohibitions may have some benefit related to certain in-school outcomes. It may help students be more attentive or engaged in curriculum, it might change certain behaviors within the school day.
My team and I really do feel, though, that any kind of prohibition needs to be paired with some form of education. The analogy I often give is that if we’re preventing access and simply giving the devices back, it’s like handing a kid a license at 16 and just saying, you can drive a car now without any kind of [driver training] education.
What are best practices that you’ve observed through your research so far?
Recognizing that probably even education that begins in late elementary school or middle school is likely too late.
[Another] challenge is, how do you create curriculum that’s customized and relevant? And that actually might vary from district to district or school to school. I don’t think there can be a universal curriculum that can be implemented that will actually have the efficacy folks are looking for. Because there’s just so many contextual differences in the needs of students based on different identities and lived experiences from district to district, or school to school, that really creates a challenge in implementing a universal curriculum on this topic.
One other thing: we interviewed teachers, administrators, school counselors, parents, and caregivers about their perceptions of these relationships and efficacy of interventions. And almost universally, folks acknowledge that adult role modeling is part of the problem. We even noticed in our observations is that even when you prohibit students from using the devices, they’re still watching teachers on their phones in the school. It’s a very mixed message.
