The Piedmont Highlander

The Student News Site of Piedmont High School

The Piedmont Highlander

The Piedmont Highlander

iLearn

iLearn

Eyes surreptitiously glance down, away from the board, to check a bright screen. A strange buzz vibrates through a pocket. Out of nowhere, a phone breaks the silence with a loud ring, causing its owner’s face to burn the same shade of pink as its case.

Smartphones: they’re in every classroom, at every desk, at the tips of every student’s fingers and on the edge of every mind.

“Cell phones may not be visible, let alone used, during class time,” according to the Student Conduct Guidelines in every planner.

But this rule appears to be infrequently followed, if not loosely enforced. For the most part, cell phone policies are left up to the discretion of individual teachers, PHS Technology Coordinator Jana Branisa said.

This means that, in the classroom, smartphones maintain their potential for distraction as well as for learning.

Learning with smartphones

In PHS classrooms, given the presence of one-to-one Chromebooks, smartphone use for learning tends to be limited, Branisa said. What use there is tends to be centered around specific apps and the camera functionality.

For example, the math department sometimes utilizes calculator apps on student phones, the English department often has students record their PSAs on their smartphones and the foreign language department finds it easiest to record audio on students’ smartphones rather than previously-utilized recording devices.

“In comparison, at Oakland Tech, they don’t have one-to-one, and smartphones are all over the place,” Branisa said. “So PHS is the public equivalent of the private world of high schools. Oakland Tech is where we were four years ago, so a lot of students there are using their smartphones for a lot of stuff. If that’s the only device, its use skyrockets.”

Junior Shannon Yan uses her Chromebook regularly, but can only recall one time in Modern World History with teacher Courtney Goen when the whole class used their smartphones to take an informal quiz. Despite its infrequent relevance, she likes the idea of using personal phones for educational purposes.

IMG_20160223_0001“It was a good experience, but you definitely feel the urge to use your phone for other things,” Yan said. “I think using your phone is very intuitive because you’ve been using it for so long for other things.”

Yan finds educational cellphone use beyond the classroom more promising: Duolingo for review on languages and Khan Academy for review on subjects including math and science. Yan also likes the communication capability of smartphones: many of her classes have Facebook groups in which students can ask questions about homework and group projects.

Getting distracted 

The distracting nature of smartphones is not some accident or unwanted side effect — it is an intentional aspect of their design to suck in their users in and form habits, according to a 2010 study from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology.

For herself and her classmates, Yan admitted that the allure of the smartphone is great.

“There’s always going to be someone texting or Snapchatting,” Yan said. “It’s more distracting than helpful because there’s always something going on, it updates in real time exactly when something happens, there’s so many more people you can connect with. And it’s always there and making a noise or buzzing.”

Branisa pointed out the addiction-like psychological behaviors surrounding phone use and the lack of impulse control among middle school students.

“The smartphone is the portal to all of these things — iFunny, Snapchat, Kik, Instagram — all this distracting noise, this psychological, visual noise,” Branisa said. “Put it away, it’s distracting. That buzz, that vibration, I don’t even want it on them.”

She especially emphasized the impact such a distraction has on the hot-button issue of stressed students and heavy homework loads and even the situation in her own home as evidence of just how distracting and harmful smartphones can be.

“That phone next to my son, is a nightmare,” Branisa said. “In my home, we have now seriously curtailed the use of the smartphone in the evening — you don’t need it. So in terms of homework time, this is a major distractor.”

In a 2013 study from the London School of Economics and Political Science, high schools in four major English cities, where over 90 percent of students own cell phones, instituted strict bans on cell phone use in classrooms. As a result, student test scores improved 6.41 percent.

But this grade boost was greater for students in the lowest quartile of prior achievement, who gained 14.23 percent with the ban. Meanwhile, students in the top quartile essentially scored the same as they would have without it.

According to the study’s authors, this suggests that low-achieving students are more likely to be distracted by mobile phones, and that, through prohibiting mobile phone use, schools could reduce the educational achievement gap between their students.

The implementation of this kind of ban at PHS, however, does not seem like a good idea to both Branisa and Yan. For Yan, in certain classes having an extremely strict, no phone policy can make her take the class more seriously and get more out of it, she said.

But rather than enforcing this policy in all classrooms, she’s more comfortable with teachers setting their own. Branisa’s reasoning is slightly different.

“I think we have disciplined students,” Branisa said. “There is also something to be said for the way prohibition happened:, if you limit what they get, they’re always going to want more, like a small kid with Halloween candy.”

The study’s authors also examined existing literature on the topic, and, despite the lack of consensus, found that technology needed to be incorporated into the curriculum and put to a specific use to have a positive impact.

According to Rice University News, researchers gave iPhones to 24 first-time smartphone users in Texas. Beforehand, they asked participants to rate several statements on a scale from one to five, with five being strongly agree and one being strongly disagree.

After a year of iPhone use had passed, they polled the participants again. The statement “My iPhone will help/helped me get better grades” at first received an agreeing score of 3.71, which fell to a disagreeing 1.54 after actual phone use.

The rest of the statements fared similarly: “The iPhone will help/helped me do well on academic tests” fell from 3.88 to 1.68, and “The iPhone will help/helped me do well with my homework” fell from 3.14 to 1.49.

Most damningly, participants initially rated the statement “My iPhone will distract/distracted me from school-related tasks” at 1.91, but later raised it to 4.03. So despite all prior impressions and assumptions to the contrary, on average, the participants found their iPhones both distracting and detrimental to their education.

“Previous studies have provided ample evidence that when smartphones are used with specific learning objects in mind, they can significantly enhance the learning experience,” said Philip Kortum, study co-author and associate professor of psychology at Rice. “However, our research clearly demonstrates that simply providing access to a smartphone without specific directed learning activities may actually be detrimental to the overall learning process.”

The potential of smartphones for learning is unmistakable — but their potential for distraction pervades every desk and classroom. Branisa wielded this double-edged sword on Feb. 8, when she was willing to return home from school just to fetch her phone, and yet still condemned herself for doing so.

“I can’t believe I did that,” Branisa said.

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