Lost in Phones
The new study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, has found that a significant number of U.S. teenagers enrolled in grades 7 through 12 use their smartphones for at least an hour every school day, with many of their online activities incongruous with the more acceptable purpose of using the devices for communication and learning, according to researchers.To conduct this study, researchers collaborated with the survey research firm Ipsos, which recruited a national sample of participants meeting specific criteria: U.S. residency, ages 13 to 18 years, English-speaking, and being the primary user or owner of a smartphone. A total of 117 participants were recruited for the study.
The study used a smartphone application called RealityMeter to objectively track cellphone usage among the participants. The findings showed that adolescents spent an average of 1.5 hours on their smartphones during school hours, accounting for approximately 27 percent of their total daily phone usage. Also, 25 percent of participants spent more than two hours on their phones while at school.
“As a parent of two middle schoolers, my concern is that students are missing out on learning and social opportunities during the day,” Lauren Hale of Stony Brook University, senior author of the study, told The Epoch Times. “In my opinion, school should be a place for listening, asking questions, reading, writing, and engaging with peers in real life. Smartphones during the school day are a distraction from those types of activities.”
Researchers found that during school hours, the most common smartphone activities included messaging, social media engagement, video streaming, and email.
While half of the teen participants indicated they used their smartphones for studying for at least 66 minutes daily, they also reported spending an average of 25 minutes on Instagram.
Hale pointed out that this is one of the first studies that objectively assessed smartphone use during the school day. However, the current analysis is “simply descriptive, intended to provide parents, teachers, administrators, and policymakers with information about actual smartphone use among students,” she said.
Cellphones a Major Distraction: Survey
A survey conducted by Pew Research in the middle of last year found that high school teachers are especially likely to see cellphones as problematic.Roughly seven in ten high school teachers (72 percent) reported that student distraction due to cellphones is a major problem in their classrooms, in contrast to 33 percent of middle school teachers and only 6 percent of elementary school teachers.
According to the Pew survey, 82 percent of K-12 teachers in the United States indicated that their school or district has some form of cellphone policy. This was most prevalent among middle school teachers (94 percent), followed by elementary (84 percent) and high school teachers (71 percent). However, about a third of teachers with cellphone policies reported that these rules are “very” or “somewhat difficult to enforce.”
Cellphone restrictions in schools can be difficult to enforce because of inconsistent enforcement by teachers, lack of strong administrative support, and especially, student ingenuity in hiding phone usage.
In response to growing concerns about cellphone usage in schools, New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) is the latest politician to propose new legislation aimed at restricting cellphone use in K-12 schools throughout the entire school day while requiring schools to provide parents a means to contact their children during the day.
The key takeaway of this study, Hale said, “is that more than half of the students in our sample spent over an hour per school day on their personal smartphone. I hope parents and teachers take this opportunity to talk with their students about the role of smartphones in the classroom.”
