It Sure Looks Like Phones Are Making Students Dumber
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
lolwut? What's the context on this?
But that phones are a huge distraction devices isn't particularly controversial; this has been observed internationally, and also in contexts outside of education.
That there are also other issues with education is a separate thing.
I have kids, and this is literally the first time I've ever seen anyone mention this. "Peppa Pig" and "[x] likes Peppa Pig" are phrases thrown around with reckless abandon among parents and children.
For context, my experience with school had been different, so I do think they is a lot of variety. I also see that different families have different uses of technology. Some I find healthier than others, for my definition of healthy which is using it more to explore and be curious but less to mindlessly pass time.
As recently as 2006, Finland used to lead the PISA studies designed by the OECD to evaluate educational systems. The latest PISA results show kids in Finland have fallen substantially behind their Asian counterparts, and the trend is very clear since 2008.
Finnish schools haven't had serious budget cuts, don't suffer very badly from parents' culture wars, and also remain largely single-language environments as they used to be. (While the number of immigrants has increased in 15 years, it's nowhere near as large to explain the PISA score drop.)
The primary culprit seems to be students' phones and the poorly thought rollout of various digital gadgets into classrooms to replace books and chalkboards. While Finland's scores have dropped, neighboring Estonia has risen to the top of the rankings with its more old-school educational environment.
Also covid happened and online only schools might have an effect too
> Across the OECD, science scores peaked in 2009, and reading scores peaked in 2012. Since then, developed countries have as a whole performed “increasingly poorly” on average
Are you saying that the developed world as a whole is misappropriating school funds and cutting budgets?
Over the last decade or so, quotes like that and the parable of "The Emperor's New Clothes" have gone from old pearls of wisdom for me to basically just describing the way the world works.
Sounds like bullshit. If you're talking about the so called "don't say gay" law, that's not what the law does and nobody is barring students from talking about gay things.
You can't live your life being worried about offending people who have chosen to be offended.
Test scores are probably declining because parents are more worried about the sexual orientation of cartoon characters rather than their child's test score, among other distractions. The root of the problem is that respect for education in the US is low.
Yep, that’s the way to do it, and it can be fun, especially since it’s just helping rather than full on home schooling.
Most school curricula have different and concrete objectives (basically meeting aggregated KPIs) rather than “is the student actually learning?” Also teachers have a lot to deal with, and always have, tangential to actual teaching, like disruptive students.
I think the best part of the supplement is that most school work has no context (“will this be on the test?”). Especially in math, where you spend 12 years “learning the alphabet” and only after high school do you get to the fun parts, if ever. So at home you can actually see how the stuff you’re getting in school actually relates to the realm world, and can pursue interesting paths.
I found the biggest problem of his approach is that he didn't care about figuring out my interest (TBF I didn't know either). The extra-curriculum study is mostly aimed for getting into a better school later so he first taught me Math in advance and then some extra for competitions. And even for programming he extremely hates gaming (to this day he thinks game developers are bad people, like people who do narcotics) and ONLY wants me to do competitive programming. Anyway I did not have any interest for anything he taught so it has been a painful drag for both of us until he kinda gave up when I reached grade 10.
Now that my kid is 3.25, I want to try something different. But I do find myself lacking the time or knowledge to prepare material for such activities. I want to expose him to a variety of activities after he reaches 4, say arithmetic and simple reading (so he can then spend more time reading books by himself), but I do not know how to approach teaching the topics. He is as impatient as a child can be and of course he is not interested in learning stuffs, which is definitely less interesting than, say, watching tanks crashing cars.
All in all, I know nothing about pediatrics education and need to know more before damaging our relationship as my father did back in the day. Neither do I have the mental energy reserve to burn candles to research on such topics. But I'll try.
* well, down to the Planck length I suppose :-)
Most math education is syntactic transforms, not understanding. There are lots of skill-appropriate puzzles in books and online you can do together so your kid can see that math can be fun. Same applies to other subjects — learning about US history? Make a trip to some local historical thing and when kiddo is bored just run around or whatever.
While not scientific, it is a sentiment described in _Diamond Age_.
On one hand, I've heard that a class of 30 kids gets almost half a million dollars of taxpayer money per year.
On the other hand, I've heard that teachers get a salary of about $50k, and have to beg on gofundme to equip their classrooms with basic stationary.
I really have no idea how to get these two facts to line up.
If you ask anyone, they'll tell you they're busy because that's the socially acceptable thing to say. If I'm honest, I don't do that much work (I tend to believe that's actually why we create and maintain all of these machines - so we don't have to work very much, but I'm apparently a disagreeable sort), but I still say that I'm keeping busy because if I said that I'm basically lazy and just want to meditate or watch TV most of the day away, people (particularly my employer) might take issue with that.
My cousin is a teacher and manages that job plus a couple side businesses plus 3 kids. Somehow he finds the time.
One takeaway from the covid lockdowns I took is it seems that to a first approximation, school is where children go for babysitting and perhaps learning happens there somehow. That would reflect my memories (plus it was a good place to score drugs).
I didn't think much of the system at the time, and even less upon reflection some years later, and it's not a system I'd want to put kids through, but I seem to say that about an increasing number of aspects of the modern world, so it's likely I'm just some sort of antisocial malcontent.
I'm regularly confused by people whose entire knowledge of classrooms comes from being a student, who nevertheless feel like they are experts and have all of the right answers.
Do you know why teachers get paid so little? Because there's a surplus of people who want to be teachers; actually getting a teaching job, let alone one at a good school, is a serious accomplishment. The schools that have a hard time keeping teachers are the ones with shitty students (due to shitty parents) which burn out teachers fast. The ones who can hack it at those schools use their experience to seek employment at better schools (positions at good schools are so competitive that having experience before applying is almost essential.)
What on earth?
- https://www.npr.org/2023/03/23/1164800932/teacher-shortages-... - https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2023/10/17/tea...
> I know several teachers
So, because 'some' of them don't work very hard, it's your 'belief' that all teachers aren't as busy as they say they are? Or are you now back-tracking your earlier comments? Does re-using lesson plans mean that those teachers aren't grading course work, or doing other activities, or are you assuming that "lesson plans" is the sum total of any extra work they may be doing?
I feel like this is just a cop out comment (particularly with the mealy 'I totally know some people' as evidence), moreso given the clear lack of understanding of the acute teacher shortages in this country, particularly in rural areas and particularly exacerbated over the last 4 years that you nevertheless think not only doesn't exist but is actually a surplus, in complete contradiction of literally all available evidence.
And to reiterated, the difference between a good school and a bad school is the quality of the student body, who reflect the quality of their parents. It's not funding. Often the worst schools have the most funding because people think that will make the school better, but over-funding schools won't fix kids who are fucked up by their parents.
Anyway, you asked for comments from people who know teachers. I know teachers, but I'm not here to back up your preconceptions. Deal with it.
This is not supported by any evidence, unless you assume that all rural schools, for instance, are "shitty schools". But hey, let me throw yet another link you'll not look at while repeating things that are patently untrue:
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/07/25/texas-teacher-shorta...
I've no idea why you're talking about funding, as if that has anything to do with anything I've said, but article after article suggests the absurdly low teacher pay is a major issue - talking about ephemeral 'funding' in that context is dishonest.
But sure, you "know" teachers. You're not answering the questions because... you don't want to back up my preconceptions that are based on direct experience, er, I mean, "preconceptions"? Um, ok.
> but I'm not here to back up your preconceptions.
Says the guy who just keeps repeating himself when faced with linked evidence his preconceptions are incorrect.
So while the statistics may break it down to a half million per classroom, that classroom doesn’t actually see that money. It’s chewed up with special education and the bureaucracy.
My local school district (generic midwest USA), there's a 17:1 teacher ratio, each student represents $13,011/yr in funding (so a single classroom gets $221,187 in government funding each year). Of that, the teacher in that room collects a salary of $40k to $60k W2 salary each year (plus benefits). Or, a teacher's salary is basically ~20% to 25% of the budget for that classroom, and the rest goes elsewhere.
And yeah, our teachers get literally nothing for their rooms, so they have to beg parents to donate crayons and tissue paper and pencils and basically anything else in their classroom, every year. (generally, each parent is expected to pitch in about $100 per student per year, in donate-ables to cover the stuff the district won't provide for teachers)
The proportion that goes to the management levels above the teachers keeps going up, instead of to the teachers or teaching materials.
What do you think this means? Is having a picture of me and my wife on my desk "pushing my heterosexual orientation" on my co-workers?
I'm really confused by what you think is upsetting in a cartoon with multiple Mom/Dad characters, also including a lesbian couple. Why is it ok to "push" one sexual orientation, but "worrying" to "push" another?
This is patently and demonstrably false. Numerous cultures and societies have happily tolerated homosexuality.
Again, what is being "pushed" on kids? What are you suspicious of? I don't understand why you don't want to answer a very basic question.
It is.
> with the subtext that they should experiment with it.
This is purely something you've invented, whole cloth, out of nothing. No one is suggesting kids experiment with any sexual behavior in elementary school, and the belief that telling your child that "Jane has two mommies" is encouraging your kid to hook up with their same sex friend is absolutely as patently absurd as the notion that telling your child "Jane has a mommy and a daddy" is encouraging them to hook up with an opposite-sex friend.
I've never seen an abstinence curriculum that avoids mentioning the existence of heterosexual couples.
The fact of the matter is that homosexuality isn't learned, it is something that people inherently feel.
The school didn't come up with the cartoon, others in society did. Children are going to talk about cartoons that they watch. My parents didn't always like the cartoons some of my classmates watched. Their solution was to not let me watch them, and instill their own set of values in me. They didn't ask the school to shelter me from the existence of other's ideologies.
There are ways to discuss sensitive and ideologically divisive topics in an academic and neutral way. The way religion and politics are covered in social studies courses is often a good example of this.
You don't have to pick sides to cover a topic in a neutral manner.
Speaking from personal experience, when I try to read a book nowadays I find I need to reread paragraphs a lot at first until my mind settles and can get into the flow. Being away from tech distractions for a day or two, e.g. camping, seems to have a similar restorative effect on my attention span. Even then, am I at 100% of the attention span I'd have if I never indulged in scrolling feeds and reacting to social media and whatnot? Maybe. I'd guess not. It's worth trying to understand.
Too many people leave the default notifications on and assume it’s just how things work. People need to be taught to realise their attention is valuable and that notifications are taking it for free.
People need to be tech literate, banning phones for students won’t help them down the road, it’s only deferring the problem.
For one example, the push notification system is absurdly abused, and it's difficult to get the right balance of awareness versus distraction. Trying to get the notifications settings how I want tends to fail in one of two directions:
1. I miss an important/urgent email or message (terrible), or fail to respond to a dating app message in time. (Not responding quickly to messages is offensive to some...)
2. I'm just constantly annoyed by irrelevant updates or even blatant SPAM.
Ultimately, I disagree that the problem with phones lies with how users choose to use them. It's that the environment provided is overrun with software that's hostile, geared towards unhealthy usage. With new OS updates and new apps come new pitfalls and additional effort needed to get everything behaving how a reasonable, tech literate, self-respecting person would want. Some will jump through the hurdles to get things under control, but most just default to being abused, and I strongly believe it's asking too much of people, especially younger people, to understand what's at stake and to make all the right moves. When I point to phones as a source of problems, that's really what I'm talking about.
You see places like Thales academy growing and killing it on a budget far smaller than our per student budget and you really have to wonder as well, because it implies the budget isn't the real issue either. I sometimes wonder if the big thing is parents at home who are pushing in the right direction followed by teachers that just teach and don't taint things with political BS, as my best teachers were the ones I couldn't tell you who they were going to vote for (suspect left to far left candidates but I couldn't be sure because they presented issues mostly neutrally).
I did attend a US high school at a time and place where evolution was given equal footing to creationism which was bizzare for me having moved from a largely atheistic society. One minute talking about plasma as the 4th state of matter the next minute about the 'theory of dinosaurs'. My concern is any rights used to protect access to Peppa Pig will also be wielded by religious zealots to force religion back into science and everywhere else. Is Peppa Pig really that important to be worth that risk?
I was born in the 70s.
We needed to take our own tissue boxes to school.
No one mentioned Peppa Pig, of course, but for other reasons.
A grammarian my age would tell you that "in a myriad of politics" is incorrect.
It's insane? /s
The apps kids are using on phones have the mechanics of slot machines. There is no way that this is good for them.
Unfortunately, they are not using their time online to research 9th century Persian literature.
“Each class knows less than the one before, over more than a decade” and “yeah, obviously it’s the phones, they’re a constant problem” are what you’ll hear from all of them if you ask about this stuff.
I learned as an adult I have ADHD. I’m high functioning so I never got tested as a kid, but it’s 100% a condition I always had. It made a lot of aspects of my life since childhood make sense.
[0] http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
So I think there's something more going on. I think maybe it's that text was the "default" communication medium, and speech is becoming the default.
I am faster on a touchscreen than most people are on a keyboard. I have seen teens who are ~50% faster than me.
It's just training.
On the other hand (on both hands ;) ) it feels wonderful to type on my thinkpad. I never compared speed or accuracy, it's just undeniably much more comfortable.
Yes, in the beginning, it feels terrible, because you hit the glass too hard, but after some time you adjust your tapping and hit the screen with the minimal force necessary to register a touch.
Yea, it will probably never feel as comfortable as your thinkpad, but once you get the hang of it, it isn't the difference between "wonderful" and "sucking".
There's no convincing, it's like comparing old, low quality shoes that don't even fit you to my perfect pair of shoes.
I can use all 10 fingers with minimal movement, I get immediate feedback, I don't have to hold anything. There's no training that can replace that. Typing on a touch screen will never not such.
I think OP means sending actual voice memos. Yeah, I’d just never listen to most of those. I’m not the sort who has AirPods in my ears all day, so stuff with audio in messaging apps usually gets skipped.
So it might be a platform-specific thing. I definitely find typing on an iPhone to be rather painful, but swiping on Android is very, very fast.
Things that are much less common over my (long) lifetime:
-memorization of classic poetry and lines from literature
-memorization of tables for simple math operations (+ - * / )
-memorization of telephone numbers
-memorization of how to travel to different locations, even in a city
Is memorization of the alphabet next?
It's a difference of degree.
There was this thing I read years ago about how teenagers in Japan don't know how to write a lot of kanji by hand, but they'll recognize and be able to use it when typing it in their phone (since the input is phonetic and it autocompletes to possible kanji).
I think it's probably relatively common, at least for some generations. Voice memo gets them past a very big source of anxiety.
Is this a regional/socioeconomic thing? I very rarely see people record and/or listen to voice recordings in public, and my friends certainly don't do it.
I've never used voice messages like the ones being talked about in this thread so I don't know if there's a particular reason they hold the phone that way
I know I do (with certain friends, depending on context).
Now this was an extreme behaviour exhibited, but am sure this is the same with everything that we have traditionally been indicators of skill - we still don't understand perfectly the underlying mechanics here of intelligence. Does memory play a role? How does long term memory / encoding affect our ability to have intelligence ? Is our ability to learn something new an indicator of intellect?
Given these unanswered questions - I doubt our current education system really measures intelligence as it has continued to develop over the years because of introduction of devices and an explosion of information.
For example (inspired by my kid's struggles to learn multiplication), if you're calculating 7x6, it helps to remember that 6x6 = 36, and then just add another 6. Much easier than calculating 6+6+...+6.
Wouldn't having a total grasp of adding 6 seven times be considered smarter than using that shortcut?
And wouldn't the logical evolution of that mental shortcut be to simply use the tool in your pocket instead?
I too have similar tricks for math, but there must be plenty I'm not aware of because I just use my phone, and because there is no clear incentive nor reward to learning these tricks.
Is it smarter to memorize math shortcuts that you don't actually need, or is it smarter to circumvent them and employ your attention fruitfully elsewhere?
I'd rather not think in terms of "smarter" or "intelligent", since then you open the discussion to nitpicking what we mean by those anyway. I'm more interested in how to think reasonably fast and accurately, i.e., how schools typically measure smarts. There these shortcuts absolutely help.
> Wouldn't having a total grasp of adding 6 seven times be considered smarter than using that shortcut?
Not necessarily, since by having to do more calculations exposes you to the risk of errors, and being overall slower. The user AlanYx had a very nice response to my previous comment on this.
> And wouldn't the logical evolution of that mental shortcut be to simply use the tool in your pocket instead?
Well.. Depends. If every time you see a multiplication, your immediate reaction is to go to your pocket and start typing numbers, you have a lot less feeling for the numbers themselves, and your flow of thinking is interrupted by thinking about the phone.
> Is it smarter to memorize math shortcuts that you don't actually need, or is it smarter to circumvent them and employ your attention fruitfully elsewhere?
Ideally, sure. However, in practice what tends to happen is that you do the calculation with your phone, get your answer, look at the phone in your hand and see all the social media notifications. The attention then goes to checking the messages, reacting to a funny meme and scrolling the latest social media outrages. You can't really think of the phone as a microchip in your brain that instantly provides you with the correct answer, it comes with its usual drawbacks too.
It is appealing to some educators to lean on 6+6+...+6 because it shows conceptual understanding, but counterintuitively students who don't make the jump to memorizing 6x7 or something close like 6*6+6 (cognitive scientists call this "fluency") end up having difficulty learning higher-order concepts because of the working memory bottleneck.
The gradient of the graphs in the article is pretty worrying though and I'm sure that phones/social media definitely have some effect.
In my view grade inflation, no child left behind, common core, the lack of streamlining and gifted programs, the democratization of university, the increased cost of university and the reluctance to fail people who have paid so much money, rampant cheating by international students, etc all played a roll. Phones just poured fuel on the fire.
How many people in the old days said that maths was defunct now that we had calculators. No need to try, I'll just ask the calculator. Same thing with the high number of examples of "I home-schooled our kids and now they are clever" as an implication that schools are bad and kids will just learn anyway.
The importance of learning is not just storing facts but exercising the grey-stuff to think laterally, to be creative, to experience non-instinctive solutions to problems that you simply would not work out by yourself (unless you are lucky). Also, helps you to know how to apply knowledge and problem-solving.
So having phones, and the internet, feels like people are not learning how to apply stuff and going into the world of work thinking that everything is just about facts that you can lookup.
If people live in a world of ubiquitous phones and internet access, maybe we should teach them how to live in such a world.
Yes, that's the world they now live in. They need to know how to communicate (both send and receive) in voice and video.
But there's some good stuff in the highlights of what was produced over the last several thousand years. All of that stuff is written. Then need to be able to access that too. And, since a significant fraction of the more thought-oriented stuff is still in writing, they also need to be able to write.
I grew up before the era of laptops and smartphones, and came up with a bunch of strategies to avoid distraction - revising for an exam? If it's a less interesting subject, it's got to be printed media only, in the library, in silence. Because I knew, no matter how long it took me to find an answer in books, finding it online would take longer with the inevitable distraction taken into account.
I'm glad I never had to attend video lectures, or have a laptop on my desk in school, because I would have failed for sure.
For calls where I really should be listening though, I often do some mindless chore like folding laundry or doing dishes. Very easy then to concentrate on the call while satisfying your need to get things done at the same time.
I hate that about myself - I'm too reliant.
Same goes for a lot of things that we can just quickly lookup nowadays, I don't think its a bad thing but rather the brain doing what it always did and should do - adapting.
Maps themselves are a shortcut tool!
> what if there's an emergency?!
This excuse didn't fly in the era of flip phones. Classrooms and the front office have phones which can be used in cases of genuine emergencies.
Do we have evidence that the set of questions asked on exams revolve around the same theme of questions?
I remember doing my high school chemistry exams and one of the teachers intentionally set very obscure questions on topics we didn’t cover.
We all did poorly and she used to say “students are getting dumber”. That was a decade ago.
Turns out when the teacher got replaced and the new one asked questions from material we studied, “students are getting smarter”.
ChatGPT and future models are training on entire corpus of available human knowledge including the various high school and college level exam set.
So much of exams is pattern matching on existing questions asked from previous exams.
Learning requires a modicum of dopamine hygiene, and dopamine hygiene is bad for business.
Does low test score means students became dumber or they care less about tests?
In many important aspects of life, failure to produce results takes precedence over such a distinction.
* There is something addictive about this form factor plus the touch interface, especially when combined with the way apps have designed to maximize the effect. This is by far the worst thing about this platform.
* They are “too” easy to use. Before the iPhone and iOS (and a bit later Android) people were becoming “computer literate.” Remember that phrase? They were learning to actually use information technology. Mobile halted that process.
* It’s a medium for consumption, not production. Input with them is slow and cumbersome and best suited for short sound bites like tweets or TikTok videos.
* They bias media toward short interaction and therefore shallow content. You can't express complex ideas that way.
* They constantly interrupt and combined with short form interaction and addiction are destructive to attention.
* They were built from the ground up to be walled gardens that crush experimentation and innovation.
* They are surveillance machines, and lend themselves to significantly more intrusive surveillance than most other tech except maybe cars… and cars are just trying to ape the mobile surveillance model.
* The ecosystem is toxic and built around exploiting the user through addiction, surveillance, and impulsive purchasing.
* Since they are so constrained, they supercharged the trend of all compute moving to the cloud where you own nothing and have no privacy.
The phrase “cigarettes of the mind” seems to fit.
All the useful things my phone does could be done with a much simpler device providing a map, a way to text and read email, and a browser. Most everything else is superfluous and a large amount of it is actively harmful, especially to young people and those not tech savvy enough to avoid the predatory aspects of the system.
If you could order Uber or Lyft through a browser I would be tempted to get one of those hipster minimal phones. There’s no technical reason you couldn’t. They just want you to use the app to maximize tracking.
I've been using smartphones since 2003. Smartphones prior to the iPhone were tools through and through. They were designed to be communicators, or maps, or, sometimes, actual phones. Texting with T9 with feature phones was definitely popular, but they were still very limited in capability.
I don't think the iPhone was borne to become an addictive consumption machine. I think it was created to make smartphones more accessible. It succeeded at doing that. Great things exist today because of the iPhone. Unfortunately, there will always be people who are out to make money no matter the cost, and I don't think anyone knew or foresaw the consequences of long-term phone use that exist today.
https://www.theeducatoronline.com/k12/news/mobile-phones-smartwatches-to-be-banned-in-qld-schools/282807
I can accept the assertions about smartphones, being massive attention grabbing devices. I know before I neuter all the "engagements", it chimes every minute.
However, we're also seeing massive inflation for quite some time. Food costs are up, stability of living has been down for some time. How much of other variables are also contributing or overriding smartphone usage?
(And blocking cell signals is a quick meeting with the FCC, if using active methods.)
I guess it could be used as a longitudinal study... But the speed of technology is speeding up (technology is accelerating technology). I can't see this being that useful.
Again, where's the current schools that ban smartphones? That would be much more useful than something 11 years ago. (Yeah, 11 years...)
>For the past few years, parents, researchers, and the news media have paid closer attention to the relationship between teenagers’ phone use and their mental health. Researchers such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge have shown that various measures of student well-being began a sharp decline around 2012 throughout the West, just as smartphones and social media emerged as the attentional centerpiece of teenage life. Some have even suggested that smartphone use is so corrosive, it’s systematically reducing student achievement.
I wonder if it's mainly younger people who believe this inflation is traumatic, because they haven't experienced a real economic crisis.
https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA%202022%20Insights%20and%20Int...
So if you just glance at it you can see science scores have dropped by 12 points between 2006 and 2022! That's terrible! Oh wait, but they dropped from 503 to 491... or less than 3%. For math scores the decline is 22 points! But it is from 502 to 480... or less than 5%.
I should also point out that part of the article discussed survey results that showed more screen time was correlated to having lower scores but on Page 13 of the above OECD doc they have a graph showing higher math scores were correlated with school buildings being closed... How were those students learning if not remotely, on screens, all day?
That being said, I think it's hard not to look at the statistic of 45% of students feeling anxious if they don't have their phone on them and not be worried about the mental health of the younger folks among us.
I call bullshit. The kids are alright.
You know who can’t handle the epistemic crisis of this global many-to-many information system? Anyone over the age of 50.
Teenagers might have a new way to distract themselves from schooling but they do not fall for the spin the way your dad does.
Do you have teenage kids? Mine is falling for a new health/beauty/wellness 'spin' on a near weekly basis.