News

37495 readers

1803 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil

Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.

2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.

Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.

3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.

Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.

4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.

Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.

5. Only recent news is allowed.

Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.

6. All posts must be news articles.

No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, blogs, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.

7. No duplicate posts.

If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.

8. Misinformation is prohibited.

Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.

9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.

All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.

10. Don't copy entire article in your post body

For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

JonsJava@lemmy.world

gedaliyah@lemmy.world

little_cow@lemmy.world

138

‘Close to zero impact’: US study casts doubt on effect of phone ban in schools (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 3 days ago by throws_lemy@reddthat.com to c/news@lemmy.world

29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] INeedMana@piefed.zip 11 points 3 days ago (2 children)

🤨 just a few days ago - maybe up to two weeks, there was a post somewhere here linking to article that said teachers are noticing positive effects on scores. It might have been Australia, though

[–] CurlyWurlies4All@slrpnk.net 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

From an Guardian article in Oct 2025, roughly 5 years into the first statewide phone ban in Australia:

One year after the ban was implemented, a survey of almost 1,000 public school principals led by the NSW Department of Education’s Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation found that 95% of principals still supported the ban. Eighty-one per cent said the ban has improved students’ learning, 86% said it has improved socialisation among students and 87% believed students were less distracted in the classroom.

Research from South Australia – released in March this year – revealed 70% of teachers reported increased focus and engagement during learning time and 64% of teachers reported “a lower frequency of critical incidents” at school as a result of device use.

Ruqayah, who graduated from a western Sydney high school in 2024, thinks the bans were an “overreaction”. After going through high school with access to phones, she finished her final year with the phone ban in place and says fellow students were still finding ways to use them in secret. “Teenagers find their phones very important,” she says. “It makes them feel secure and safe, so taking away something that is important to them just causes more stress and more worry which makes situations worse at school and harder for teachers, supervisors [and] support workers to deal with.”

Prof Neil Selwyn from the School of Education, Culture and Society at Monash University. “Some politicians were promising improvements in student learning and mental health. But one of the main drivers of these bans was undoubtedly that they were popular.”

Selwyn says phone bans in Australia were not set up “with the intention of properly testing their effectiveness” and says concrete research in this area is “inconclusive, and … not particularly rigorous”.

He also believes the latest government data from NSW and South Australia is “not particularly insightful”.

“The key question is how these bans play out over time,” he says. “Claiming that these bans are suddenly leading to dramatic improvements makes for a neat political soundbite, but we need a lot more in-depth and sustained investigation of what effects these bans are actually having.

[–] WhoIzDisIz@lemmy.today -1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

There are positives and negatives to everything - highlighting just one side is the modus operandi for manufacturing consent.

[–] adespoton@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago

Conversely “both sides”-ing a quantitative study is only useful if you want to make a narrative appear more important than it actually is.