As talk about banning phones in schools increases, a new study revealed that the average teen spends a quarter of their school day scrolling.
Research led by the Seattle Children’s Research Institute found that adolescents — aged 13 to 18 — spent an average of 1½ hours per 6½-hour school day on their smartphones.
Public health and pediatric scientists sought to understand not just overall adolescent screen time use, but particularly the duration and content of that use — especially while at school.
“As a public health researcher and a mother of two middle schoolers, I am concerned that too many kids are missing out on both learning and in-person social opportunities during the school day by looking at their phones,” senior author Lauren Hale said in a statement.
“School hours are precious.”
A national sample of nearly 300 participants took part in a 15-minute smartphone-based survey, installing the RealityMeter app to track how people used their phones. After analyzing the data and narrowing down the sample to just those who accumulated smartphone data during two or more school days per week, they were left with a sample of 117 eligible adolescents.
Within that smaller sample, although teens averaged 1½ hours of smartphone use during school, researchers learned that over 25% spent more than two hours on their phones in the classroom.
Aside from general browsing on the internet, teens used their phones for text messaging, Instagram, video streaming, audio and email the most.
The study results were published Monday in a JAMA Pediatrics research letter, “Adolescent Smartphone Use During School Hours.”
Researchers believe that more research needs to be done with larger sample sizes that will reflect a broader fragment of society.
“Unfortunately, too much of the existing research on digital media use relies upon self-reported data. In this study, we were able to objectively assess smartphone use, enabling a much more granular understanding of timing and content of smartphone use,” said Hale, a professor in the Program in Public Health and the Department of Family, Population and Preventive Medicine in the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University.
“Parents and adolescents may derive benefit from access to phones for communication and learning purposes during school,” the authors concluded. “However, application usage data from this study suggest that most school-day smartphone use appears incongruous with that purpose. The analyses show high levels of social media use during school.”
The study comes amid a recent push to ban smartphones in schools. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul recently released a report titled “More Learning, Less Scrolling” to shed light on smartphone use during the school day and create “distraction-free” classroom environments.
A proposed ban suggested by Hochul would start at the beginning of the next school year and would require public and charter school students to be free of any “internet-enabled devices” from “bell to bell.”
