Broward County has banned all cellphone use in school. Palm Beach County school leaders think cellphones can be either a learning tool or a disruption, allowing use only at certain times. Miami-Dade permits internet access for academic purposes and had a school board meeting in July to discuss screen time guidelines for students.
While each district in South Florida has a different approach, a new study analyzes if smartphones are truly useful in the classroom. The study, co-authored by University of Miami Patti and Allan Herbert Business School Dean Paul A. Pavlou, showed that guided cellphone use in the classroom could bridge the gap between low-performing and high-performing students.
Student achievement was examined in four categories: no access to smartphones, free access to smartphones, guided access to smartphones and no access to smartphones while paper-based educational material is used instead. Students took comprehension tests before and after a lecture. Although unrestricted cellphone use caused performance to drop by 32% during the first experiment, banning smartphones was not what caused the best results. When teachers encouraged students to use their phones for learning, performance increased by an average of 26%.
“The guided use of smartphones with the appropriate app outperformed all other combinations, including the paper study and the banning of the smartphones,” Pavlou said. “So it was essentially an educational aid that made it easy for students to check some words, the pronunciation, how they’re written.”
The study took place at a vocational banking school in central China during a Mandarin learning class for students 14 to 23 years old. The randomly selected students received the same lecture with different groups having varied access to smartphones.
“(Technology) tools can be much more interactive, much more sophisticated. So kind of relying on old school paper-based aids will not be as well-received by students in this day and age, even if they’re exactly the same in terms of the material,” Pavlou said.
China was chosen due to its loose restrictions surrounding filming students. The banking school already had cameras installed as a security measure for when students were learning to distinguish between real and fake money. Researchers could monitor phone screens and analyze the exact amount of time spent on the educational app or other online distractions.
According to Zhe Deng, a leading author of the study and a PhD student at Temple University, people have a limited attention span and will find a way to distract themselves regardless of a cellphone’s presence.
“In the (guided) smartphone policy, we have strong influence on those underperforming students. The students kind of easily lose their attention or concentration on the learning part,” Deng said. “So if you introduce smartphones, it will keep them from sleeping or chatting with each other. Then instructors can lead them to allocate more time on learning.”
The study also found that smartphone use helped male students catch up academically to female students, although the correlation between smartphone use and gender needs to be researched further.
“Can we just summarize our videos into short clips and make it like a TikTok and boost learning? We want to give it a try for emerging technology, how to turn addiction into learning content rather than entertainment content,” Deng said.
However, Allen Zeman, a Broward County School Board member, believes the harms of cellphones outweigh the benefits. While cellphones could assist with learning, social media access impacts the mental health of students, causing insecurity and anxiety.
“The real question is, is the damage caused by (social media) greater than the learning caused by cellphones? And can’t we get that gain in learning through iPads, laptops?” Zeman said.
Broward County teachers allow students to occasionally take out their phones for learning purposes, such as scanning a QR code to answer questions. But the ban remains strict and students cannot use their phones during lunch.
According to Zeman, school fights are down 17%, a change he credits to the cellphone ban.
“We had a fight several years ago where 100 kids at one high school got together and had a big fight, and you can’t do that without a cellphone, you can’t incite enough people to show up at the right place and the right time to have that fight if you didn’t have some ability to communicate,” Zeman said. “Instead of people intervening or deescalating they prefer to record it.”