Mobile phone use and academic performance

I've posted a couple of times about the effect of laptop use on student performance (see here and here), and more recently about the effect of mobile phones on student learning. That last study, which was based on a mobile phone ban in secondary schools, provided some suggestive but weak evidence that mobile phones reduced student test scores. I recently read another study (open access), by Andrew Lepp, Jacob Barkley, and Aryn Karpinski (all Kent State University), published in 2015 in the journal SAGE Open, that comes to a similar conclusion.

Lepp et al. base their results on an analysis of a survey of 518 university students, who were asked about their total mobile phone use in minutes per day (for "calling, texting, video games, social networking, surfing the Internet, software-based applications, etc."), and whose survey results were matched to their academic record (in particular, their GPA). They found that:

...there was a significant, negative relationship between total daily cell phone use and college GPA...

They then conclude that:

These results suggest that given two college students from the same university with the same class standing, same sex, same smoking habits, same belief in their ability to self-regulate their learning and do well academically, and same high school GPA—the student who uses the cell phone more on a daily basis is likely to have a lower GPA than the student who uses the cell phone less. 

That may be true, but it doesn't really answer the question that we really want to answer, which is: "Does mobile phone use reduce learning?" In my ECONS101 class this week, we talked about the difference between causation and correlation. What Lepp et al. found (and they acknowledge this in their conclusion) is a negative correlation between mobile phone use and academic performance. That could be because mobile phone use causes reduced learning. To that end, Lepp et al. suggest that:

...the negative relationship between cell phone use and academic performance identified here could be attributed to students’ decreased attention while studying or a diminished amount of time dedicated to uninterrupted studying.

However, as I noted in the ECONS101 lecture, just because you can tell a good story about why an observed relationship is causal, that doesn't make it causal. In this case, it is possible there is reverse causation (maybe doing worse in class makes students want to distract themselves more, and they use their mobile phone to do that), or more likely some third factor is affecting both mobile phone use and GPA (maybe more conscientious students use their phone less and also do better in class).

We're going to have to wait for a better study (perhaps purely experimental, or based on a natural experiment) before we'll have a clear idea of whether mobile phones are bad for learning, or not. In particular, even if mobile phone use causes worse student learning, presumably it isn't all forms of phone use, but particular types of use (or timing of use) that is the real problem. Lepp et al.'s study doesn't provide us with any answers to those questions, so really tell us much that we didn't already know (or suspect).

Read more:

• If laptops are bad for student learning, maybe mobile phones are too
• Strong evidence that laptop use in lectures is bad for learning
• Is it time to ban laptops from lectures?