Sigrid Folkestad, editor of a research bulletin, tells us that Norwegian research has shown benefits from restricting cell phone use in schools and that the government is starting to tighten the rules:

Sara Abrahamsson’s thesis “Essays on Empirical Labor and Health Economics” is the first in Norway to examine whether a mobile phone ban in secondary school has effects in the slightly longer term. She shows that a ban on smartphones significantly increases girls’ average grades.

It improves their test results in mathematics and increases the likelihood that they will choose an academic program in high school. At the same time, the ban helps to reduce bullying. The effects are most visible among girls. One explanation for this effect may be that girls use their mobile phones significantly more than boys at this age.

Sigrid Folkestad, “Mobiles Should Be Out of the Classrooms, NHH Bulletin, February 12, 2024. The paper is open access with registration.

Interestingly, according to Abrahamsson’s findings, the stricter the ban, the greater the gains, and girls from poorer families showed greater improvement.

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.”

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.”

Shannon Larson, “Middle schools in Norway banned smartphones. The benefits were dramatic, a study shows.” MSN, April 27, 2024

Norway has a lot at stake here. It ranks #4 in the world in the U.N.’s Education Index, a significant statistic for a small country. The United States ranks #13. Meanwhile, the state of Florida has also banned the use of smartphones in class and other states are beginning to follow suit.

But is the phone ban all it’s cracked up to be?

Enter the naysayers. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has written a bestseller, The Anxious Generation (Penguin 2024) on captivity to the phone, counters, “That Norwegian school ban paper does not really tell us much, in part because…. hardly any schools banned phones; most just asked kids to turn of their ringers,” adding “It’s only phone-free if a school uses phone lockers or Yondr pouches.”

Stetson University psychology professor Chris Ferguson, who thinks the entire concern is a moral panic, counters that, when the data are exampled closely, the true statistical effect is miniscule:

Put simply, even if what Norway is doing is a ban, which it is not, this study provides very weak evidence for any benefits for these policies. It mainy relies on tiny effect sizes and often non-significant results. I blame this on the academic field of economics…the author appears to be from an academic department of economics. Don’t get me wrong, economists do smart and important work…on economics. But they have a marked tendency to blow it with human behavior, often engaging poor quality studies and exaggerating the meaningfulness of trivial effect sizes. Ok, that actually sounds a lot like psychologists, so perhaps I should be kinder to my economist friends.

In short, there is very little to see here. There’s nothing in this to support any kind of “ban” as educational policy (in fairness, the study so poorly defines banning that arguably there’s not much here to refute bans either). Yet it is a shame that some smart people have promoted it in such a misleading way. This is further evidence of how low the bar is for evidence as regards to our current social media panic.

Chris Ferguson, “Did a New Study Show that a Norwegian “Ban” on Smartphones Helped Kids? Secrets of Grimoire Manor, May 12, 2024

What to think …?

I find it hard to understand why anyone would doubt that irrelevant messaging from cell phones is a distraction for a student who is trying to learn a concept, whether it is the Pythagorean theorem or the use of metaphor in literature. All the worse if the message is from an exclusive clique, a school bully, or an outside predator. No wonder if girls —especially lower status ones — have mental health issues related to the constant presence of cell phones. They are simply at greater risk from constant negative messaging. Many students struggle hard with abstract concepts in math or literature anyway. Their only real hope is dedicated teachers in a distraction-free environment.

The stakes are high too: For many such students, a STEM degree or a genuine communication skill like fluency in a second language could be a road out of poverty and dependence. But the hard task of concentration comes first. The clickbait or cool new ringtone is, in that context, a deadly enemy. If educators don’t see that, so much the worse for education.