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The long-running debate over whether to ban smartphones in schools has intensified in recent months, fueled by increased warnings about the harms of social media on youth mental health and the distractions phones cause in class.
This week, social media was abuzz about a study published earlier this year out of Norway that tested the argument: How would student outcomes and mental health be affected if schools banned smartphones?
The research found the impacts were positive, including decreased bullying and improved academic performance among girls. Author and organizational psychologist Adam Grant highlighted the findings on X, formerly Twitter, saying “smartphones belong at home or in lockers.”
The study examined more than 400 middle schools in Norway that had implemented phone bans and relied on three primary data sources: a nationwide pupil survey, survey data on middle schools’ smartphone policies, and a compilation of Norwegian administrative datasets, including health and family registers.
Almost one in four countries have introduced laws or policies banning smartphones in schools, according to a report published last year by UNESCO.
After researcher Sara Abrahamsson presented her doctoral thesis — which included her study on how smartphone bans affect middle-school students — at the Norwegian School of Economics last May, it caught the eye of politicians, and now, according to the business school, the government has begun “significantly tightening the rules on mobile phone usage.”
Here’s a look at the key findings.
Fewer consultations for psychological issues at specialist care
In schools with bans, the number of specialist care visits for mental health issues fell among middle-school girls. And the data suggested the longer the girls were exposed to the ban, the fewer visits they needed.
Girls also had fewer consultations (a decline of about 29 percent) with their general practitioner. The research, however, did not find any effect on the likelihood of students being diagnosed or treated for psychological symptoms and diseases after bans were enacted.
“The decline in the number of consultations for psychological symptoms and diseases shows that after a ban is implemented, girls are in less need of care related to mental health issues,” Abrahamsson wrote.
She also said that compared to boys of the same age “girls have, on average, increased levels of mental health issues during the adolescent years,” and therefore may be “more intensely affected by the ban” than boys.
Incidence of bullying fell for girls and boys
Educators and experts have pushed for school smartphone bans because of cyberbullying among students (adolescents sending harmful texts to one another, for example).
The study found that after Norway middle schools banned phones, the incidence of bullying decreased for girls and boys. Girls who went through three years of middle school with a ban reported being bullied by other students about 46 percent less compared to when no policy was in place. Four years after a ban on smartphone use was implemented, boys experienced a decline in bullying incidents by about 43 percent.
“My results suggest that a low-cost intervention such as banning smartphones from schools might be an effective policy tool to reduce bullying and improve adolescents’ mental health,” Abrahamsson wrote.
Girls made gains in their academic performance
Girls who started middle school with smartphone bans in place saw improvements in their grades and GPAs, and scored higher on externally graded mathematics exams, according to the study.
Girls were also more likely (4 to 7 percentage points higher) to attend an academic high school track “after experiencing a ban,” Abrahamsson wrote. “This effect amounts to an 8–14 percent point increase in the probability of attending an academic high school track relative to the pre-ban years.”
The effects were only significant among girls who were exposed to a smartphone ban for at least two years. Abrahamsson, however, found no effect on the mental health or academic performance of middle-school boys, which she suggested could “result from the substantially higher phone usage among girls” in Norway.
Girls from lower socioeconomic backgrounds saw the most benefits
According to the study, girls from lower socioeconomic backgrounds saw the greatest benefits from a smartphone ban during middle school, from reduced visits for mental health care to improvement in grades.
These differences suggest that “unstructured technology is especially distracting for students from low socioeconomic families” and far less so for students from “high socioeconomic families,” Abrahamsson wrote. “Between girls, this means that the gap in mental health and educational performance declined along the socioeconomic spectrum.”
Stricter smartphone bans yielded the best results
The study found that gains in academic performance were the greatest among girls who attended middle schools that had stricter smartphone bans, such as ones that prohibited students from “bringing their phones to school or schools where students must hand their phones in before classes start.”
In contrast, more lenient policies, including those that only mandated students keep their phones on silent, had less of an effect — and could even work against educators.
“Behavioral experiments have shown that just having your phone nearby, but in a silent mode, could even increase phone usage, especially for people with increased ‘Fear-Of-Missing-Out,’” Abrahamsson wrote.
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Via https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/04/27/metro/norway-study-smartphones-banned-in-schools/
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Author: stuartbramhall
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