How smartphones are watering down intellectual thought and hurting test scores
Change is needed.
“I don’t remember college students looking this young,” I thought, as I stood at the front of the lecture hall.
I was giving a guest lecture on writing at the University of South Florida. I’d done one before and was looking forward to doing this session on ideation. My prior lecture was with a master’s writing class, not that I consider myself a master of anything. But my journey with writing is a unique one, and I did have insights to offer.
Today, it was undergrads, and many of them chaotic, tardy, freshman at that, so my expectations were low. This was compounded by the lecture starting at 6 PM, after many students had already endured a long day. This was particularly evident as I watched them filtering into the auditorium. Many were slumping and tired, and checking the clock already.
The professor gave me a brief introduction and I dove in. As I began my PowerPoint, I noticed the phones peeking out from under desks like rodents checking for cats. Students gazed hypnotically down at their laps, clearly browsing the internet.
One young lady had her phone inside of her textbook, discretely hidden as she scrolled some unseen app. I felt a strange insecurity sweep over me. I thought, “Is my lecture this boring? It went over so well in the master’s class. What is happening?”
I faced the plight of every middle school teacher in the world wrestled with, but I pushed past it and ignored students slipping between the cracks of their TikTok notifications.
After the class, the professor, who’d been my professor 20 years prior, said, “It has only gotten worse. I’m seeing students turning in inadequate work, unable to pay attention, and asking questions another student asked only minutes prior.” He added, “It wasn’t nearly this bad a decade ago.”
The impact of smartphones on cognition isn’t a new concern, but has come under increasing scrutiny by researchers in recent years — and the trend isn’t good.
Test scores have been falling for years. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, reported a precipitous decline in scores and it is only partly attributable to COVID-19 and its aftermath. Even students who aren’t playing on their phones in class are being impacted. Students who reported being distracted by other people using their devices in some, most, or every math class, scored 15 points lower in math. Now, a confounding factor could be, that the students reporting this distraction, could be in a problematic classroom, where other distractions are at work too.
The problem is that other studies echo this finding. A report by The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which focuses on 15-year-old students’ performance, stated, “No single country showed an increasingly positive trend in any subject, many countries showed increasingly poor performance in at least one subject.” Even the most hailed country’s in the realm of education, like Sweden, Finland, and South Korea, have shown declines in their scores. A telling component of this is the timeline. Science scores began declining in 2009, which coincides with smartphones being more used by the masses.
I graduated high school in 2002, and was in college just prior to all of this smartphone chaos, and now feel grateful for that fact. Our phones were still bricks. I kept mine in a drawer in my dorm, turned off on most days. Which is exactly the step some are taking.
For example, a school in Australia took the dramatic step of banning smartphones entirely from the building, which led to significant parental backlash. Some even argued the phones helped with learning. But there’s burgeoning research that the information you learn on your phone isn’t even retained as well.
“The more time that kids spend on digital devices, the less empathetic they are, and the less they are able to process and recognize facial expressions.” — Professor Mark Williams, Macquarie University
It’s worth mentioning that the aforementioned PISA surveys have their share of critics, who argue that standardized tests measure only what you intend them to measure. They aren’t a surefire measure of someone’s intelligence.
This is fair — to some extent. But it is clear that the phone is causing damage. Students who spend time on their phone take fewer notes and retain less information than their counterparts. And by extension, the inverse of this statement was also true. During experiments, the students whose phones were taken away performed better in nearly every instance.
My partner is a college professor and she routinely goes to schools to give guest talks and also does research with the students as participants. One trend she borrowed from another class is to have students leave their phones by the front door, in some safe storing area. Many of these classes already have rows of pockets that can hold the phones. This also keeps them out of vision, reducing the aforementioned effects.
How to reduce the suffocation of the phone
I was reflecting on the avalanche of troubling research on smartphone impacts on our cognition, and realized this little devil in my pocket is akin to an IQ and productivity leach.
So as an experiment, I began keeping my smartphone in a separate room for four hours a day, much to the chagrin of people in my life. I did so because I found myself passively checking my notifications and hearing the phone calling out to me even after I’d just set it down. I also took out a piece of paper and made a line every time I found myself itching to check my phone. Then, I made it a point to reduce the total lines I was putting down each day.
Quite quickly, my productivity improved and I felt this serene sense of focus as I worked through projects.
Dr. Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist, wrote in The Atlantic that the mere proximity of a smartphone in your field of vision takes away from your focus. Even if it’s in a drawer nearby, or in your pocket, it can lunge for what remains of your diminished attention span.
Us adults are fortunate that we no longer have developing brains, which could so easily be warped by the incoming changes. And to the parents seeing this, consider discussing how much smartphone time your child is using. I’m sympathetic to your cause. Many parents now offload their children onto a child-friendly iPad at an early age, because they provide such sustained engagement, and become like a free babysitter to their child.
I do fear that this next generation are being groomed for complete control by their devices, and that we might be watering down their potential.
And if you are a college student reading this, give your lecturer the time of day. We put hard work into these talks. It’s demoralizing to see TikTok stealing you away from the moment, and a chance to help you grow and learn.
During my aforementioned lecture, there was one — just one — student who was in the middle of the room, paying attention, not playing on his phone. He was asking questions and taking notes. That day, he was like a hero to me. And I suspect he’s learning more than most.
Let’s all aspire to be more than our smartphone notifications.
I'm a former financial analyst turned writer out of sunny Tampa, Florida. I began writing eight years ago on the side and fell in love with the craft. My goal is to provide non-fiction story-driven content to help us live better and maximize our potential.