Some years ago I met Alp Sungu at a conference and that would turn out to be decisive. We quickly found common ground in a shared concern, and a shared optimism, about how digital technology shapes the lives of children and young people. Alp later introduced me to Pradeep K. Choudhury, and three years ago the three of us launched a very ambitious project: to evaluate, at scale, how phone bans in the classroom affect students.
It has been a wild ride, and today we are happy that our study is out in Science. It has already been covered by a number of outlets, including The Economist.
Across more than 400 classrooms and over 16,000 students, half were randomly selected to hand in their phones during class. Students placed their phones in a box at the start of every session for an entire semester. The study took place in the Indian state of Odisha.
Our main result is that students' academic performance improved (0.073 SD), and the effect was largest among the lowest-performing students, so the ban also reduced inequality in performance. We also found that students who experienced the ban became more positive toward it. Once they felt the benefits, support for "no restrictions" dropped markedly.
Phone bans keep spreading around the world, but evidence on whether they actually work has been lacking. Our results suggest that policies like these can strengthen learning, especially for the students who struggle most, and build their own support over time.
In many ways our study is only a small part of the larger journey toward giving children and young people the right exposure to technology. As newer and more powerful technologies, AI in particular, move into classrooms and homes, the need for careful experiments does not shrink; it is more urgent than ever. We have to keep studying what these technologies do to learning, attention and well-being, not just assume it.
Read the paper here.
Many thanks to our funders (SODAS and Department of Economics at the University of Copenhagen, the Tietgen Prize and Wharton) and to our fantastic team of research assistants and partner institutions, who made this project possible!