New Zealand introduced a mobile phone ban in schools in April 2024. The reason the government gave for the ban was that it would remove a source of distractions, and that would improve student achievement and wellbeing. Eighteen months on, it would be fair to say that views on the ban vary widely.
It's a little early to evaluate whether the New Zealand ban is working in terms of student achievement and wellbeing, but we do have evidence from other countries. One example is this discussion paper by Sara Abrahamsson (Norwegian Institute of Public Health), which investigates the impact of a ban on mobile phones in middle schools (grades 8 to 10) in Norway. There was no blanket policy on mobile phones across all of Norway, so Abrahamsson takes advantage of variation in mobile phone policies across schools and over time. Importantly, the study investigates the impacts on students' mental health, bullying, and educational outcomes. This involved using Norwegian Registry data on education (which includes middle school grades) and healthcare (which includes visits to GPs and psychologists), along with data on mobile phone policies collected through a survey of schools. The student sample covers students who finished grade 10 between 2010 and 2018, across 477 schools. The event study design essentially involves comparing students at schools with a mobile phone ban with students at schools without a mobile phone ban.
First, in terms of mental health, Abrahamsson finds that:
...banning smartphones reduces the number of consultations for psychological symptoms and diseases at specialist care, by about 2–3 visits during middle school years when exposed for full-time in middle school. Relative to pretreatment this is a significant decline by almost 60% in the number of visits. In addition, girls have fewer consultations with their GP due to issues related to psychological symptoms and diseases – a decline by 0.22 visits – or 29% decline relative to the pretreatment mean. However, I find no effect on students’ likelihood (extensive margin) of being diagnosed or treated by specialists or GPs for a psychological symptom and diseases.
Notice that the positive impacts are concentrated amongst girls. There are no statistically significant effects on boys' mental health outcomes. Turning to bullying, Abrahamsson only has school-level (not student-level) data. However, she finds that:
...banning smartphones lowers the incidence of bullying for both girls and boys when they are exposed from the start of their middle school years to a ban.
All positive so far. Does student achievement also improve? Abrahamsson finds that:
...post-ban, girls exposed to a smartphone ban from the start of middle school make gains in GPA, average grades set by teachers, and externally graded mathematics exams. Post-ban girls gain 0.08 standard deviations in GPA, and 0.09 standard deviations in teacher-awarded grades and have 0.22 standard deviations higher mathematics test scores compared to girls not exposed to a ban... Additionally, girls are 4-7 percentage points more likely to attend an academic high school track after experiencing a ban. This effect amounts to an 8–14% point increase in the probability of attending an academic high school track relative to the pre-ban years.
Again, there are no statistically significant effects for boys. All of this seems to fit with many people's priors, that mobile phones are a distraction for students, and particularly for female students. Digging a little deeper into the heterogeneity of effects, Abrahamsson finds that:
...health care take-up for psychological symptoms and diseases, GPA, teacher-awarded grades, and the probability of attending an academic high school track is larger for girls from low socioeconomic backgrounds.
In fact, the effects for girls from high socioeconomic backgrounds are statistically insignificant, so all of the significant overall effects are being driven by girls from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Abrahamsson doesn't offer a good explanation for these heterogeneous effects. Perhaps girls from high socioeconomic backgrounds face greater parental limits on mobile phone use, have different behavioural norms at school and/or at home, have more extracurricular activities that distract them from their distracting mobile phones, or have more effective personal coping strategies. Clearly, there is room for more follow-up work on why the benefits of the mobile phone ban are concentrated within the subgroup of girls from low socioeconomic backgrounds.
Abrahamsson concludes that:
...banning smartphones from the classroom is an inexpensive tool with sizable effects on student’s mental health and educational outcomes.
The conclusion is sound based on the results. Despite the different context, there are some important takeaways for New Zealand. No doubt researchers are already evaluating the mobile phone ban and its impacts. However, we need to know more than just whether it worked. We need to know whether it worked in different ways for different groups of students (by gender, and by socioeconomic background), and importantly we need to know why.
[HT: Marginal Revolution, last year]
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