From: The New York Times
The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education
The standardized test scores of American students had been rising for decades. Then they began to slide, dropping to their lowest point in two decades in 2023 and 2024.
This is not a problem confined to the United States. Worldwide, the performance of 15-year-olds in math, reading and science reached a nadir in 2022.
These dismal results are at least partly a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Missed instruction during those years may still be having an impact on academic performance.
But that’s only part of the story. The decline in test scores started well before the pandemic, around 2012. One obvious culprit is smartphones, which became popular just as test scores started to decline. Since 2017, I’ve been doing research on what smartphones do to our mental health, and I recently started to study how they affect academic performance. The negative impact of smartphones on learning is one reason many school districts have instituted a bell-to-bell ban on smartphones in K-12 education, including all public schools in New York State, which also banned students’ personal laptops, tablets and smart watches.
Read the whole story (subscription may be required): The New York Times
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