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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

That can't be true because the Mentava and Alpha School kids use screens for instruction and they're doing well from parental reports.

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If you draw your test sample from private schools and $500/month apps, your conclusions are going to be pretty skewed.

Are they? Supposedly screens kill focus and yet private school children are using screens and they aren't defocused. At best you could argue that the effect is that screens affect focus so little that if you're able to pay $500/month you can completely obviate the effects.

How do you know they aren't defocused, relative to other comparable private schools? Anyway, when people say screens affect focus, they don't mean that it's an inherent property of LCD displays. They mean the things people do on screens—youtube, games, social media—are a potent distraction. It's metonymy.

They didn't say "affect focus". They said "kill focus". If the answer is "a 99.99th percentile child will test at the 99.98th percentile" then we can go ahead and say that, but clearly the effect size is not large or else it would have shown up. If screens had a significant effect on focus, then we should see it in these children. If they have an effect, clearly the effect is weak and either easily dealt with by good pedagogy or it does not exist.

We're sitting here postulating massive effects and then we don't see massive effects. The effects, if they exist, must be incredibly small in order for these kids to be testing at the high levels they are.

I say this as a parent who has kept his daughter from screens and probably will. This stuff always comes up "Oh it absolutely kills focus" "Well, then why doesn't it for these kids?" "Actually, by kill focus I meant that it has a mild negative effect on focus which is not detectible and easily overcome by good teaching even if it were detectible which it isn't and also I didn't mean that screens kill focus. I meant that social media etc. on devices with screens do that" "Okay, so teaching with screens is fine" "oh no, screens absolutely kill focus"

Christ.

You would have to compare it to a cohort using no screens to know whether there was a benefit or loss.

If the effect size is large (ie the screens are substantially damaging) we’d expect to simply directly observe something but these kids test near the top. You only need that kind of comparison if the effect is not acute.

Not sure what you’re saying here. I think you’re saying you can just observe the top performers and measure whether the top performers use screen time frequently outside of school. Not sure this works as it’s probable that the top performers are gonna be the same in both situations.

However, my concern was with the use of screens IN schools as part of the curriculum and as a replacement of textbooks and other sources.

Alpha School students learn their lessons almost exclusively from a screen during the intensive 3 h first section of day. If screens were debilitating these children would not show high percentile MAP scores. The children do. Therefore screens cannot be debilitating.

At worst they can have a negative long term effect or a mild deleterious effect. But they do not have an acute deleterious effect.

OK, but would these children have done better without using the screens? That is the question not whether students can possibly do well with screens. For example, what if the students at the top are less impacted by using screens and would’ve done just as well with books. And at the same time, some of the students in the middle would’ve done better when using books. The analysis you suggest would not catch that.

Indeed, that's a question you have which I understand you may be eager to find answers to, but I am primarily focused on the original statement of

> ...the excessive use of screens that kills focus and the desire to learn anything that doesn't move

Screens killing focus is clearly not backed by evidence. There may be other evidence that shows that when stratifying by percentile achievement, screen use places students at a percentile below where they would be otherwise. But it is clearly false that the use of screens kills focus and the desire to learn anything that doesn't move.

Killing focus is an absolute term. You don't have to compare against someone else to determine if focus was killed. If the kids have focus at the end, then it is not killed. And at best it could be slightly reduced.

e.g. If you have the hypothesis that mangoes are acutely toxic and kill people you don't have to sample a lot of people. You are claiming a strong effect size. If even 5 people eat mangoes and don't die then the answer is that they are not acutely toxic.

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