MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
More students than ever are going to schools where cellphones aren't allowed. More than two-thirds of states now have some restrictions, but are kids more focused? Are they learning more? A year ago, the National Bureau of Economic Research brought together academics from top universities to study these bans and highlight possible steps forward. This week, they issued their report. NPR's Sequoia Carrillo has been covering this and is with us now to tell us more about it. Good morning, Sequoia.
SEQUOIA CARRILLO, BYLINE: Good morning, Michel.
MARTIN: OK. There were a lot of reasons why lawmakers wanted to take away cellphones in schools - I mean, student mental health, engagement, but also as a fix to declining test scores. Did the study show that banning cellphones is succeeding?
CARRILLO: So yes and no. Are the bans doing what they set out to do? Absolutely, yes. The study found dramatically reduced cellphone activity in schools with restrictions. And teachers in states with bans also reported that the number of students using cellphones in class dropped on average from 61% to just 13% in three years. But the more complicated part here is student achievement. And like you said, this is not the only reason to ban cellphones. But the study did find that the bans had a, quote, "close-to-zero" effect on test scores. It's easy to look at that as a disappointing figure, but education gains are notoriously slow. And researchers say it's often hard to see a trend when zoomed in on only a few years.
MARTIN: How do they measure the effectiveness of the bans? You know, kids are smart. I mean, they can find work-arounds.
CARRILLO: Definitely, definitely. So this study looked specifically at schools around the country that use Yondr pouches. They're just these lockable bags. They're a really popular way to keep phones physically with students but render them useless without a key. But like you said, students are clever. I mean, I've personally, in reporting on this story, seen students in Louisville, Kentucky, and in New York really circumvent these bans quite easily. They tear them open. They put old or broken phones in the pouch and keep theirs on them. So something I liked about this study was that instead of surveying students or counting the number of these pouches in use, they looked at cellphone data based on geographic location. The researchers saw how often phones were used from before the bans were adopted and then in the three years since. And that's where we saw the dramatic drop in usage.
MARTIN: What else did they find?
CARRILLO: So since there's no way to discern when a phone pings that's a student's phone versus a teacher or administrator, the researchers also paired that data with a teacher survey to gain more context for what's happening inside the classroom. They also layered, I mean, attendance data, disciplinary data. And they also surveyed students about social-emotional awareness, and they put all of that in the findings. So there's a ton in this study, but a lot of it is quite promising, like disciplinary action, for instance. It initially rose in the wake of these bans but leveled out by the end of the study. As for emotional well-being, students said they felt worse in the first year. But by the third year, students reported feeling better off than before the bans.
MARTIN: Are these researchers taking this as a win?
CARRILLO: I talked to Thomas Dee, a professor of economics at Stanford and a co-author on this study, and he characterized this research as the first draft of a new approach to schooling. Even though these bans are very popular with teachers and across party lines, this is still new territory. It does go against years of schools trying to harness technology to improve learning.
Cellphones are far from the only devices connected to the internet in a classroom. So many places are now restricting screens in schools, going one step further, so on - time on laptops, tablets and other devices. We've seen this in four states so far, and the Los Angeles school district plans to limit all screens as soon as this fall.
MARTIN: That is NPR's Sequoia Carrillo. Sequoia, thank you.
CARRILLO: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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