Does cell phone use outside of the classroom effect your overall grade?

I am an avid cell phone user, especially during the dry moments in class and at 19 years old there sure a lot of them. It has been told to many students numerous of times that repeated cell phone use in class can destroy your overall grade. This has been proven time and time again. But today is no ordinary day. My goal is to analyze whether or not cell phone use outside of the classroom may effect the overall grade or gpa.

To answer this question I turned to a study conducted at Kent State University in Ohio. The objective of this study by the Health and human services researchers at the University surveyed about 500 undergraduate majors across a range of majors. In addition to tracking their daily cellphone use, they also measured their happiness their grade-point averages. In order to calculate results of the participants the the survey given was constructed of four sections: demographic information, the Satisfaction with Life Scale, questions about cell phone and texting use. Just to step back and analyze how this study is being conducted so far I see nothing wrong. We have great use of representative sample which helps create a good representation of a large population. Secondly, the survey is pretty self explanatory and displays all the information needed to conduct the study to find out the results in a fair way. To measure academic progress through the study, the students signed off to let their official academic records be seen by the researchers.

The results are honestly shocking when I read them. Especially being a huge cell phone user myself. Students with more cellphone use had lower grades. Students with more cellphone use had higher anxiety and students with more cellphone use were less happy. A couple of things to note. There are a ton of cofounding variables still left unknown. Every individual taking this survey has their own backround and their own circumstances thatchy are in which can easily effect their happiness and grades. So yes the findings to point out some interesting facts and most students should probably consider but nothing is 100 percent definite. Correlation doesn’t equal causation.

To relook at the situation to get a better handle of how cell phone use effects performance I found a study from The Centre of Economic Performance. We jump from college to high school for this study. Although this is a bit of difference in schooling high school is actually a greta setting for studies such as this because the students are contain
ed within the school grounds under school rules. You can kinda look at this as a lab experiment. In many different schooling districts researchers at the University of Texas and Louisiana State University surveyed cell phone policies across schools in four English cities since 2001, studying how exam scores changed before and after the districts banned cell phones in their schools. The researchers found “We found the impact of banning phones for these students equivalent to an additional hour a week in school, or to increasing the school year by five days.” The study concluded that test scores increased by 6%. That is a decent number for just banning cell phone use.

With these two studies we can conclude there is defiantly some evidence that cell phone use does disrupt students grades and may somewhat effect their emotional health. But nothing is concrete yet until more studies are taken. For now i would suggest that some students take up the challenge and put your phone away some times and see if
it does actually help. I know I will.

2 thoughts on “Does cell phone use outside of the classroom effect your overall grade?

  1. Mackenzie Jo Pardi

    I agree with the above, the lower your grades begin to decline the less you care resulting in using your mobile device more which could indicate reverse causation. I was shocked to find that people with more cellphone use had more anxiety. Nowadays everyone uses their cellphone 24/7 so does that mean we hall have high anxiety? I agree with you when you mentioned that confounding variables and the respondents own personal life could play a part in these findings.

  2. das5959

    I enjoyed reading this article. It makes you wonder though, maybe it’s a reverse causation that is between cell phone use and grades. The worse your grades are, the less you try to fix them, and the more time you spend on your phone. I do like the basis for this study, because when kid’s aren’t on their cell phones, they’re presumedly studying. So one would expect to see a decrease in cellphone use with better grades. It will be interesting to see if more studies confirm this correlation

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