Phones in Schools? What the Research Says | Abe Flanigan, PhD

Studies mentioned in this episode, in order of mention: 

Flanigan, A.E., and Babchuk, W.A. (2015). Social media as academic quicksand: A phenomenological study of student experiences in and out of the classroom. Learning and Individual Differences, 44, 40-45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2015.11.003 

Flanigan, A.E., & Titsworth, S. (2020). The impact of digital distraction on lecture note taking and student learning. Instructional Science, 48, 495-424. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-020-09517-2 

Children and Screens (2025). The Children and Screens Guide for Early Child Development and Media Use: Infants and Children Ages 0-5. https://www.childrenandscreens.org/learn-explore/research/the-children-and-screens-guide-for-early-child-development-and-media-use-infants-and-children-ages-0-5/   

Radesky, J., Weeks, H.M., Schaller, A., Robb, M., Mann, S., and Lenhart, A. (2023). Constant Companion:  A Week in the Life of a Young Person’s  Smartphone Use. San Francisco, CA: Common Sense.

Flanigan, A. E., Hosek, A. M., Frisby, B., Babchuk, W. A., & Ray, E. (2023). Student perceptions of digital distraction prevention and student–instructor rapport. Communication Education, 72(3), 217–236. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634523.2022.2149828

Beland, L., & Murphy, R. (2016). Ill Communication: Technology, distraction & student performance. Labour Economics, 41, 61-76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2016.04.004 

Beneito, P., & Vincente-Chirivella, O. (2021). Banning mobile phones in schools: evidence from regional-level policies in Spain. Applied Economic Analysis, 30 (90).

[Kris Perry]: Hello and welcome to Screen Deep, the podcast where we go on deep dives with experts in the field to decode young brains and behavior in a digital world. I’m your host, Kris Perry, Executive Director of Children and Screens. 

Today, we’re talking about digital distraction in the classroom – what is it, why it happens, and what actually helps. Our guest is Dr. Abraham, “Abe,” Flanigan, Assistant Professor of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading at Georgia Southern University. Dr. Flanigan studies the moments when phones, laptops, and social feeds compete with learning. We’ll talk about school phone bans, digital distraction, and both student and educator perspectives on how attention in the classroom can be better supported. Welcome, Abe.

[Dr. Abraham Flanigan]: Hi, thank you for having me.

[Kris Perry]: Tell us a little bit about school phone bans and the fact that they’ve really become a hot button issue in schools and communities lately, and particularly this year as more and more communities have enacted a wide variety of measures to deal with smartphones in schools from bell-to-bell bans to in-class restrictions. Many parents have voiced concerns about these bans and there seems to be sort of a murky understanding of why these measures are really even necessary. 

Before we get into the efficacy of school phone bans, I want to first back up and learn from you about your research and what it’s saying about digital distractions in classrooms from smartphones to social media to other non-learning uses of technology. So, can you take us through your research and what other researchers are learning about distraction from devices and how devices in school may disrupt classroom learning?

[Dr. Abraham Flanigan]: Sure, yeah, so my research kind of looks broadly at the interplay among students’ personal electronic devices – so, the smartphones that they bring with them into the classroom – and how that affects their on-task motivation. You know, so just their general engagement behaviorally and cognitively with course activities – a lecture in the classroom, activities that their teacher has them do on their own or with other people – and just their general sense of self-regulation. So, the extent to which students are active agents in their learning process. My research looks at the impact that readily available personal electronic devices have on those two things. 

And what we’re seeing, whether it’s in K-12 education or if it’s in higher education, is that these devices do a really good job of derailing both of those things. That they derail on-task motivation, and they derail the extent to which students take a sense of ownership and direction over their learning process. And so basically, put all those two things together, and the availability of personal electronic devices, so things like smartphones, disengage students from the learning process because of that distraction that they induce. And we’re seeing that in K-12 education, and in higher education. 

And we understand the mechanism, we know what’s going on. We know that multitasking isn’t really a thing. And so we can’t scroll through social media or text our friends while we’re paying attention to our teacher. We’re really task switching – we’re doing back and forth between paying attention in class, doing something on our phone, pay attention in class, do something on our phone. So we’re constantly task switching, and that split attention is the mechanism that’s leading to lower student learning, and that’s been the motivation that’s been driving these growing number of device bans in states across the country. So we know what’s going on, we know that it is – students are trying to multitask, they can’t multitask, and so the devices are hindering their attention and therefore undermining their learning.

[Kris Perry]: Well, you just said something that I’m sure our listeners are immediately struck by, which is you just said multitasking isn’t a thing. Most of us are running around thinking it is. So how do you know that it isn’t? And how do we know multitasking doesn’t work?

[Dr. Abraham Flanigan]: Yeah, so the research, the cognitive science research on this is when we have people try to perform two tasks simultaneously, try to juggle multiple competing pieces of information at the same time, we know that we just can’t do it – that those two tasks, those two cognitive processes, just interfere with each other. And that leads to greater number of mistakes, you know, poor performance on the on-task activity that we’re trying to attend to. So like, for instance, in my own research, we’ve done studies where we’ve had students attend a lecture and during that lecture they’re either responding to incoming text messages or they’re not. And after the lecture’s over, we have students perform a post-test based on the lecture content, and not only do we see that students who were texting during the lesson just do more poorly in general, they also do most poorly on the topic that was being discussed while they were texting. So, it’s not just that their comprehension of the entire lecture was undermined, but we can provide evidence that their understanding of what was being discussed while they were responding to those incoming text messages is the thing that’s the most undermined. And so from my own research, you know, that’s kind of a piece of evidence showing that multitasking isn’t really a thing. 

And then there’s kind of a whole breadth of cognitive psychology research that has done the same thing but they’ve had people, you know, try to study and memorize number lists while also performing other competing tasks. And we’ve consistently shown that just performance on both of the activities that they’re trying to complete is undermined because what we’re really doing is that task switching. We’re taking our working memory resources and moving them from one stimulus to the other rather than trying to process both at the same time kind of thing. That’s why texting while driving is so dangerous, because you’re not really doing both at the same time, you’re attending to your phone or you’re attending to the road, you’re not doing both at the same time. You look down from your phone, onto your phone for a couple of seconds, you’ve driven 200 feet and you weren’t able to process any of that.

[Kris Perry]: So multitasking is essentially distraction and we don’t call it that. We almost give it a positive term, when really it’s kind of having a negative impact. So what is meant by distraction on a cognitive level, from a cognitive standpoint?

[Dr. Abraham Flanigan]: So, to understand distraction, first you have to remember that you have to have been doing something in order to be distracted. So, if you’re just sitting at home and your phone rings, you get a ding or a notification and you pick it up and you start texting, that’s not distraction, right? So just using your phone throughout the course of your daily life, that’s not distraction. 

So distraction occurs when you were actually trying to attend to something, to perform a task and then a competing stimulus enters the equation, and you start to try to think about that thing. You know, so it could be you’re sitting in class, you’ve got your phone in your pocket and it starts to vibrate. Now, rather than attending to the lecture, you’re attending to what’s on your phone. And so distraction really is that split attention, that task switching that I was talking about earlier. 

And so when we think we’re trying to multitask by – so I see this all the time in undergraduate classes, sometimes even in my own classes. You’ll have your students with a phone underneath the desk, they think they’re being slick and that you don’t know that they’re texting, and they’re down there and they’re looking at their phone and they’re trying to look back up at you at the same time. So they’re trying to multitask, they’re trying to perform these two things that they want to do at the same time, but what they’re actually doing is just switching their attention back and forth rather than processing both incoming streams of information at the same time. People try to text while they’re driving. We’re looking at our screens, going through social media while we’re trying to have a conversation with somebody else. 

And the term “multitasking” is really kind of similar to putting lipstick on a pig, where we’re trying to fancy up this whole process, but really what multitasking refers to is distracted behavior. That we are – while we’re trying to engage in a specific task, whether it’s listening to a teacher, taking notes, studying, doing homework outside of the classroom. If that’s our on-task activity, well, then whatever we’re doing on our phone is that distracted behavior. And so we might think that we’re multitasking, and we’re trying to do both at the same time, but really what we’re doing is switching our attention back and forth from what we should be paying attention to to what we’re now decided to pay attention to. And that kind of distracted behavior leads to poorer performance on the task that we’re trying to accomplish.

[Kris Perry]: I’ve seen the term “motivational interference” used. Is that what you’re talking about when not attending to the task at hand when the phone goes off?

[Abraham Flanigan]: Yep, you beat me to it here. So, I think that motivational interference is the mechanism that makes digital devices so problematic. It’s what makes them, I think, problematic in the classroom, when we’re driving cars, when we’re having conversations with other people, when we’re sitting in the movie theater and we should be watching a movie but we want to pull our phone out. 

So, motivational interference is this notion or this concept that what we call “competing leisure alternatives” – so, basically just anything else that we enjoy – that the availability of those competing leisure alternatives undermines task motivation. So motivational interference has been studied within academic contexts. So, you’ll have students who are either attending to a lecture or working on an assignment or a study task. And then you’ll give them access to a competing leisure alternative that they can easily start to interact with. So, you might have students who are working on a paper on a laptop but they can see a tab open on their screen, and it’s the tab for TikTok or Instagram. And all I got to do is just move my finger a little bit and I can hit that tab. 

I would argue that the presence of our devices and the fact that they’re so easily accessed, they’re usually completely nearby. I mean, like, my phone is right here, and I’m sure yours might be within arm’s length as well. People who are watching or listening to this podcast, even if you’re not listening to it on your phone, I bet your phone’s nearby. So our phones give us access to countless numbers of really desirable, enjoyable, pleasant activities, which means that it’s constantly just within arm’s reach that we can access those things. And students typically rate competing leisure alternatives as just more enjoyable than the academic tasks that they need to accomplish. So, it’s probably not surprising that a student would find scrolling through TikTok or playing Angry Birds on their phone or tablet as just being more fun to do than reading a textbook chapter or paying attention to whatever my teacher or my professor is trying to say. 

And so I’d argue that smartphones have resulted in most of us just kind of living in a constant state of motivational interference as our phones and our other devices, our smartwatch – you know, some day we’re going to have those smart glasses where I’m going be able to click here and, you know, do whatever – that the consistent availability of those things induces that, what I would argue to be almost probably a constant state of motivational interference for a lot of us, that unsurprisingly pulls us off task when we’re trying to work on things throughout our lives, whether it’s in the classroom or the workplace or someplace else.

[Kris Perry]: Incredible. So now I want to talk a little about maybe the biological phenomenon that’s occurring at these moments and talk about dopamine. So, is dopamine playing a part in the distractibility of a device? So we’ve got this constant access to leisure activities that are highly pleasurable. And it’s easy to switch over from, say, a learning task to a leisure task. But then, once in the leisure task, a dopamine response is occurring that may be bigger and more pleasurable than the dopamine response to a learning activity. Can you talk a little bit about how that feels to the student and why it’s difficult to have them toggle back to the learning activity?

[Dr. Abraham Flanigan]: Yeah. Actually, I should go out in the hallway and see if I can track down one of my undergrads because I talked about this – well, we talked about this during class just yesterday, about the dopamine loop that screen time can create, and that that dopamine loop can begin in childhood, you know, whenever you start to give kids screen time. 

And I would say just to connect dopamine and motivational interference, before I get started – I would say that the motivational interference potential of devices is so strong because our bodies and brains know that those devices can bring us pleasure. They can also bring us a whole lot of displeasure and negative ugly emotions like through social media. But we have been kind of generally conditioned to believe that our device is something that can bring me a lot of pleasure, a lot of joy, if I use it in certain ways. And so the desire to get that dopamine hit from our phones goes hand-in-hand with that constant state of motivational interference. 

And a lot of people think about dopamine as the pleasure chemical, which it is, but that doesn’t really tell the full story. It’s the anticipation and reward chemical. So we don’t get dopamine after we’ve done something enjoyable. So we don’t just get dopamine after I open up my phone and I see that the person who I have a crush on has commented on my picture. That’s not just when we get dopamine. We get dopamine in anticipation, as well. So, just seeing the phone and remembering that, “Ooh, that has Instagram, that has TikTok,” it can bring me pleasure. That starts to elevate the dopamine right then and there. So, when I go into a baseball game – so I’m a Chicago Cubs fan – when I walk into Wrigley Field and the baseball game hasn’t started yet, I’m already getting that dopamine because I am anticipating an enjoyable activity. The Cubs don’t always deliver that, but I walk into the stadium and I am anticipating that. So my brain starts to give me dopamine, and then when I get the reward – so when I get a notification, I get a like, I get a retweet, the Cubs score a run – then I start to get even more dopamine. So it’s that anticipation of pleasure that can start to produce that dopamine. So, I’ve got my phone in my pocket, I’ve got a device that I’ve been conditioned to believe can bring me consistent pleasure. And so that availability is going to, you know, have an effect on my dopamine and then when I start to use it, it’s going to have an even greater effect. 

And I alluded to the dopamine loop, and so the dopamine loop is this idea that we interact with activities – whether it’s on a tablet screen, a smartphone screen, whatever activity whether it’s screen-based or not – that elevates my dopamine and I get into that heightened pleasure state. Well, after I stop engaging in that activity, you know, and I go back to kind of just a neutral environment, the dopamine levels will subside, and then I want more dopamine. And our phones are really good at giving us that, right? And so, all you’ve got to do is just pick up a social media screen and start scrolling through it. And eventually – you don’t know how long you’re going to have to scroll and that anticipation is going to build, but eventually you’re going to see a photo that you find funny, the person who you think is attractive that you were looking for, a message from a friend, a like, a retweet, something, and boom, you’re going to get that hit. 

If you get to the point to where your phone has conditioned you to almost being an extended state of dopamine elevation for an extended period of time, then when you get back down to your baseline, that’s going to feel uncomfortable. That’s going to feel like something that needs to be avoided. And that’s what we talked about yesterday in my child development class. The exposure to screens during infancy, that the colors, the lights, the noises, you know, these are all things that the infant brain really likes and really takes to, feels a lot of pleasure about. And actually, I know you know that because you all released the 0-5 Guidebook (which I also shared with those students, by the way). And if we make it so that our infants get a bunch of screen time and they’re used to all that pleasure coming in there, well, then that infant brain or that child brain – and you can start later, the adolescent brain or that college student’s brain – that constant stimulation is going to lead to that constant state of elevated dopamine, elevated pleasure. And if that becomes what we experience as almost like our normal, if kids are on tablets or on screens all throughout a day, you take those tablets or those screens away, they’re going to start to feel uncomfortable. This is something that needs to be avoided. 

And so I asked my students, and they’re in college now, but they were in high school not too long ago, and I was like, “True or false? You’ve been conditioned to believe that boredom is something that needs to be avoided at all costs.” And they all raised their hand and were more than willing to talk about how much time they spend looking at their screens, how that screen use began in childhood, and how that just became something that was the norm for them. And so, you know, I would argue, and evidence probably supports that, that dopamine loop that we get trapped into, that our devices are designed to get us into so we keep coming back and being repeated customers, repeated users, that that dopamine loop is probably the primary contributor to that sense of motivational interference that I said that we’re all kind of constantly walking around in.

[Kris Perry]: You may have already answered this question when you brought up young children, infants, toddlers, preschoolers and their exposure to screens, but I wonder if you could talk a little bit about other factors that may play into the creating an environment for kids where they’re more likely to engage with digital distraction. So, there’s one scenario where you started at a really young age, and so you’ve been in a dopamine loop since you were two or three years old. So, you know, you’re likely to want to keep engaging with digital media. Are there other, you might say, like, risk factors or pre-existing conditions that might lead some children to want to be involved with digital media more than others?

[Dr. Abraham Flanigan]: Sure, so if we think about a kid who’s in school and the goals that those kids are gonna have – so, you want them to have learning and academic goals, you know, obviously, and they do, most of them do for the most part, but students also have social goals. Kids have social goals, adults have social goals, and the device is a really good mechanism to help us achieve a lot of our social goals. So, if I’m sitting in the classroom, and let’s say I’m not somebody who has been exposed to, you know, that prolonged dopamine loop, but my phone can still give me access to platforms – even if it’s just text messaging – that’s going to help me accomplish my social goals. I’m going to be able to contribute to a conversation that my friends are having during class through text. I’m going to be able to share a meme or a GIF and that’s going to help me probably get some positive social feedback, a lot of positive social interaction. So, it could be that a device seems like a really good mechanism for me to accomplish my social goals. And students’ social goals oftentimes outweigh their academic goals when they’re in the classroom, unfortunately. And so we know that that could be a driving mechanism that could cause students to, you know, succumb to that motivational interference more than others, even if it’s independent of dopamine. So, students who are really kind of socially wired, socially geared, you know, those are going to be students who might be more at-risk to misuse their devices, especially in, you know, something like an academic setting.

Also, modeling. So when we see our caregivers who are spending a lot of time on their screens, that behavior gets modeled for us, we start to think that that’s normal. And we actually, you know, we experienced some of that in my own household with our son. So, I have a two-year-old son named Noah, and when I was looking at some videos of my sister’s son, my nephew Logan, and Noah asked me what I was doing. And I said, “I was looking at baby Logie.” Well, now Noah knows that my phone can give him access to Baby Logie. And so, I was modeling device use – I was laughing and smiling and showing that it was a pleasurable activity to engage in. And so, like, you know, that’s probably a scene that bears out in households across the country, across the globe, where caregivers are pretty consistently modeling device use for their kids. And it’s something that me and my wife talk about quite a bit, you know, we don’t give Noah – so he’s about 30, 31 months old right now – we don’t give him a ton of screen time. When we do, it’s a lot of co-viewing. But, we realize we need to be mindful of, we need kind of need to practice what we preach here, because if we’re modeling device use for him, well, we know that little kids are most likely to – this just comes back to behaviorism principles of psychology, that if behaviors are modeled and reinforced in front of us, then we’re going to vicariously learn from that and we’re going to want to engage in those behaviors as well. 

So, those are just a few of the factors that kind of pop out to me – the social goals, the modeling of the behavior that happens across really any context that we find ourselves in. You pair that with dopamine and that sense of motivational interference, and I think it becomes pretty clear why screens can be so appealing to kids, inside or outside of the classroom.

[Kris Perry]: I actually think that example is really sweet because some of the early guidance around screen time and little kids was co-viewing and video chatting Those were maybe the only permissible or recommended activities with young children, and you just organically gave an example of how that worked out. But then, underneath that, you are starting early on modeling, interacting with a device and finding it pleasurable. And so, that’s kind of a double-edged sword, you really have to pay attention to positive on one hand, but also leading to developing a habit, you know, or a stronger desire than you might want them to. So, great example. 

You have focused some of your research on student experiences and student digital distractions as well as instructor perceptions. And what we started out talking about early on was this plethora of policies that are popping up all over that are trying to mitigate some of what we’ve talked about going on in the classroom, and much of that’s been based on how instructors feel and what it’s been like to manage a classroom like you do. Are these two perspectives wildly different from each other or is there common ground between the way the student and the instructor perceive the device?

[Dr. Abraham Flanigan]: So, there’s a lot of common ground. So students are aware of the impact that device misuse has on their attention and has on their learning. So that’s something – so, my research at the college-level, so that’s research that I’ve found at the college-level pretty consistently. There’s been, you know, Common Sense Media polls that have shown that students are aware of the downsides of misusing their devices during class. And teachers are aware of that, as well – college professors are aware of that as well, K-12 educators are aware of that. And so there’s a lot of agreement amongst the students and amongst the teachers. 

There might actually be more disagreement among teachers themselves. So, in some interview studies that we’ve done with college professors about their views and their perceptions of their responsibility in curbing student digital distraction in the classroom, oftentimes those instructors can belong into one of two camps. There’s the camp of educators who believe that, “Device misuse is a problem and I need to address it in order to protect the integrity of the learning environment.” And then there are other educators, specifically at the college level, who believe that, “I’m here to teach and impart knowledge and, you know, help you understand this curriculum. It’s not my job to police student device misuse, that that is a conscious decision that you’re making, you need to learn to be able to regulate this behavior on your own, that’s not something that I’m responsible for teaching you.” 

And I think that that kind of goes into an argument that a lot of folks make about why we should keep phones in K-12 classrooms. The argument that, and this might not be their primary argument, but there’s folks who believe that, well, students need to be able to learn to self-regulate their use of devices on their own. And so if we take them out of classrooms, they’re not going to develop this really important skill. 

First off, smartphones became widely available around 2012, 2013. Well, now it’s 2025, so that’s 13 years ago. So, we have been able to run for the past 13 years basically a nationwide, or a global study, on do kids naturally – do they learn to self-regulate this behavior in classrooms if they have access to their phones? And, like, the jury’s not still out on that, it’s a thing we know the answer – the answer’s no. At least, within the context of how education is shaped right now, that’s – when students have access to their devices, it’s not like they just kind of naturally develop the ability to self-regulate and to use their devices responsibly when they’re in a classroom setting. In fact, they consistently misuse their devices inside of a classroom setting. So, we already know that that’s not a thing that happens. So either we need to get the phones out of classrooms or we need to adjust curriculum and lesson plans to train students on that behavior. 

Obviously now, as a society and across the globe, we’ve started to just decide that, well, better to just get the phones out of the classrooms because students aren’t going to develop this skill and/or it’s going to take too much time and effort for us to train students on that if we would’ve decided to let them keep their phones when we need to be teaching, you know, other content area, other curriculum. 

So, I would say that, like I said, we have pretty compelling evidence from this kind of natural study that we’ve been doing over the past 13 years that self-regulation of devices isn’t really going to be something that students are going to naturally pick up unless we were to change how we approach that in the classroom.

[Kris Perry]:  And much of your research up to this point has been even sort of at a more granular level, thinking about the cognitive processes of taking notes or understanding what you’ve just heard and transferring it. And those tasks, those focused tasks of learning and cognition, are being disrupted by a device that was introduced widely approximately 12 years ago. And you’re right, there’s not only, like, very specific research like yours, but then just anecdotally or broadly speaking around the globe, we’ve seen test scores dropping in countries, in states, where there isn’t really much control over the device in the classroom. So, I really appreciate you underlining that that’s a struggle that we’re still in the middle of here in the United States, and the education system has really borne the brunt in some ways of children and their devices and having that compete with what they’re there to do, which is learn. 

You talked about educators having pretty varied opinions about how to deal with, or not deal with, smartphones in the classroom. Some teachers in schools are using different approaches to regulating in-class device use to deal with digital distraction. What do students think about which approaches might be working and which might be problematic?

[Dr. Abraham Flanigan]: So in general, what we can pretty consistently see is, students want – so there’s that contradiction that goes on, because I already said that students are aware that their devices interfere with their attention, interfere with their learning, interfere with their on-task behavior – but that still doesn’t change the fact that, if given the choice, students would want to have access to those devices in the classroom. And so I should be clear that I’m talking about personal electronic devices, so the smartphone that I bring with me to class, the tablet that I bring with me to class. I’m not talking about a classroom situation where the school’s got, like, a one-to-one policy and the school’s got laptops or tablets or iPads that they provide to the kids, take them off the cart, give them to the kids for an academic task, take them away. And so I’m talking just about use and policies related to personal electronic devices. And students want to be able to have their devices on them. They’re used to having them, they’re pleasurable. They give them content, access to their parents, their caregivers, so that way they can text, plan schedules. Parents want their kids to have the phones for the same reasons. And so what we’re seeing is kids want to be able to have their devices in the classroom. 

And so policies around those would be, you can have device bans that span three different areas – you can have a complete school bell-to-bell ban from the first bell of the day until the last. You can have a ban during instruction, to where phones can’t be used during class but they can be used in between class. Or you can have a restricted policy where kids, you know, put their phone maybe in the locked pouches and then you can go and retrieve them when the teacher wants you to do. Of those three policies, students are going to favor the last one. That’s a policy that I’m fairly fine with, you know, because the students are going to be in those locked Yondr pouches and I can be able to get them unless the teacher gives them access to them. So, that’s not necessarily a policy that I’m against, but that’s going to be what the students prefer, is to be able to have access to their devices. 

Now, as an educator, you’ve got to decide if that’s something that, first off, if you’re in a state that would even allow that or if that kind of go, retrieve, put back, go retrieve, put back throughout the course of day is something that you’re going to want to have to deal with. 

But let’s say that, irrespective of device bans, when students just have their devices. So, my research with college students has shown that at the college level, students are most likely to adhere to course technology policies, so a no phone policy or no laptop policy under two conditions. First, if that policy is rationalized for the students. So, “I’m going to ban laptops in my classroom because…” and then show them the literature on task misuse when students are on their laptops in class. So, it’s been a series of self-report and observational, like, tracking studies that have shown that college students spend about 50% of a typical class period misusing their laptop for off-task purposes if they’ve got their laptop in class, showing the students that research, and then using that to justify why somebody might ban laptops in the classroom setting. That’s been shown to show students are going to view those policies as being more credible and they’re going to be more likely to adhere to those policies. 

The most effective strategies are punitive strategies. So I dock points, I confiscate the phone. In the college level, you know, I kick you out of class for the day. Those are the most effective strategies for curbing future device misuse, but students hate those strategies because they view them as instances of conflict. And those instances of conflict are associated with decreased perceptions of rapport with that professor, with that educator, in the future. So you’re going to be less likely to text on your phone in my class if I call you out in front of everybody and embarrass you, but now your perception of rapport with me is going to be soured, which is going to make you less engaged, less motivated in my classroom because you’re going to come to view me as somebody with whom you have conflict. 

So, when we see students on their phones, misusing their devices during class, what that tells us is that students are going to respond most positively and we’re going to have success when we’re tactful and when we’re enforcing policies that have been rationalized to the students. And so by “tactful,” I mean more delicate, right? So not calling the students out in front of the class, having a private conversation instead. Not docking points or docking a grade, or any other really strong punitive measure right away. You know, what are the strategies that we can do to work with the student while still protecting that relationship? Because we know that that relationship is so important in the classroom, whether it’s at the K-12 or at the college level. 

What I would argue – so I said I wasn’t totally against, like, a restrictive phone policy, but my preference actually is a bell-to-bell ban because I don’t believe that there are very good options for educators to address this without punitive measures. So, I think that if you’re a K-12 teacher and you’ve got students on their phones, the most effective way is going to be able to use punitive responses to punish that device misuse. And so by taking the phones out of the classrooms, we have removed that dynamic. So now, as a teacher, I don’t have to try to find really gentle, tactful ways to keep students off their phones because sustained over every day in class, over the course of 180 school days – like, that’s probably too much to ask of teachers. And so by removing the phone from the equation, we have taken them out of that, what’s probably a very impossible situation.

[Kris Perry]: I mean, we’re talking about individual relationships, an adult and a child, having to negotiate the best way to manage this device. A device designed to capture and hold their attention. I really feel so much empathy for instructors at every level having to negotiate these relationships when they’re really there to help the child succeed. That’s their whole point being there. 

Is there research or evidence yet about the actual efficacy of different approaches to improving classroom distraction by restricting access to smartphones?

[Dr. Abraham Flanigan]: So yeah, actually there’s been quite a bit of research that has looked at the efficacy of these different phone policies across countries. And so these studies have looked at the effects of these policies on device misuse frequencies. You know, so do these policies actually curb student misuse of devices? They’ve looked at achievement effects. So do these policies, when enacted, boost student achievement? And then also considerations for student well-being. So, how do these policies affect student social emotional well-being, if at all? 

And what we’ve found across the – they’ve done a lot of the – most of this work is international. So, your listeners are probably going to realize that most of these bans that have come into effect in the United States have occurred over the past couple of years, and they’re still ongoing, right? So in the state of Georgia, for instance, we have a ban that’s going into effect next academic year. So I’ve been part of a team that’s been gathering some data on teacher perceptions of that upcoming ban, which I can talk to you about. But I just want to point out for the listeners that these findings are largely international-based; there’s not a lot of large-scale studies of these outcomes in the United States. Studies have shown that students in countries like Australia, Spain, Norway, South Africa, when device bans are put in place that most students comply with the device ban. 

So last year, I was interviewed by Georgia Public Radio about this upcoming policy that we have in the state of Georgia. And they asked me how I – what was my anticipation for how students were going to respond to it? My thought was they ain’t going to be happy about it right away, but eventually we’re going to develop the “movie theater effect,” where you go into a movie theater, you know that it is socially inappropriate to be on the phone. So, you know that it bothers people, it distracts people, and so when somebody’s on their phone and the light’s on, we know that that annoys other people. And so my hunch was that when students – at first they weren’t going like the policy, but then it was going to get normalized, and people are resilient, people adjust to change, and that eventually students would start to come around and just embrace – not embrace the policy, but follow the policy. We’ve seen that internationally. We’ve also seen that here in different counties in Georgia. So we have a full statewide ban that’s coming into effect next year, but there are some districts in the state of Georgia that have already banned phones in their counties. And, you know, conversations with those educators has shown me that initially, there was some resistance from the students, but as time went on, students just, you know, got used to the policy and the frequency of device misuse had just gone downhill. 

In those international studies, we’ve also seen that students’ performance on national exams – so there was this really large-scale study published that came out of England and student scores on national exams increased by six and a half percent after a national phone ban went into effect, and they equated that to about 10 extra days of instruction, that effect of what else could we do to boost student performance by six percent. They equated that to like 10 extra days of hardcore instruction in those areas. In Spain, their national PISA scores went up after a ban went into effect. 

And we also know that there’s well-being effects that are tied to these phone policies. In these countries, they’ve reported greater numbers of students just face-to-face interactions in the classroom, in the hallways, on the playground, and they’ve also tracked decreased rates of bullying and other form of victimization in schools where devices have been removed because now when I’m in class, I’m in class paying attention, if you want to bully me, you’ve got to do it out loud, face to face. That’s not as easy as texting me a mean anonymous message on some online message board or something. So, when we get rid of phones, we also decrease the amount of victimization that happens in schools. Obviously, it’s still going to happen outside of schools, on the weekends, after school ends, but during the school day, there is less bullying and less victimization.

And so, the efficacy of these bans has proven to be pretty effective for device misuse frequencies, for academic achievement, and for student well-being.

[Kris Perry]: Very promising study results so far. Is the research showing more or different effects of device restrictions for certain populations of students?

[Dr. Abraham Flanigan]: So the device bans tend to have the best academic effects on students who were either already academically struggling – so you remove the device, then you’ve removed another barrier to their focus, to their attention, and you’ve provided those students who are already struggling academically with just a better learning environment. So the benefits for academically struggling students have been uncovered in a couple of meta-analyses that have been published within the past few years and in these different countries that I’ve shown when they did subgroup analyses of students. So, previously academically struggling students in England, in Spain, did better academically, they had the best benefits. 

And then also students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Those kids are going to be – I mean, obviously not all of them, but a lower SES student is going to be more likely to be in an underfunded school with larger class sizes. That’s going to be more kids in a classroom space on their devices. But if you’ve taken the personal electronic devices out of the school, especially for lower SES kids where they might be in larger classrooms and have more students around them misusing their devices, you get those devices out of there and the academic benefits are pretty strong for those kids, as well.

[Kris Perry]: You mentioned parents earlier and how they like their kids to be accessible during class time. We’ve heard that many parents have safety concerns about school phone restrictions with the perceived risk of, say, a school shooter situation, and they’re really worried that they won’t be able to reach their child during a dangerous situation. What do you think about that as a safety concern?

[Dr. Abraham Flanigan]: I do think that phones are a really important consideration for student safety, but I think it’s actually the phones that are the risk to student safety. So this is the point that I wouldn’t yield. If I was at a dinner party and people brought this up, I would be the dinner guest who wouldn’t want to just let this point go. I see phones, and I’ll explain why, as a threat to student physical safety and their social emotional well-being. 

So, in June of earlier this year, 2025, the United States Congress, a House Committee on Education and Workforce, they convened a hearing titled “Screen Time in Schools.” And at that hearing, there was testimony from experts, policymakers across the country. And one of the people who came and testified that day was Jean Twenge. She’s a university professor, researcher, kind of a social-educational psychologist. And Jean testified about how the presence of phones in something like an active shooter situation can make the situation more dangerous. A lot of her testimony was based on the insights from the President of the National School Safety and security services, and there were four points about why phones are problematic in that kind of an emergency situation.

First, there’s the concern that students, if they’re on their phones, they might miss important instructions that are given during an emergency situation, or they just might slow things down. So, if I’m on my phone trying to text with my parents and my teacher is trying to get me to go to the safe place in the room and I’m on my phone and I’m not moving, I’m slowing the process down for me and for everybody else and I might be more likely to just miss those important instructions. 

Noise from phones could alert the shooter to the location of students who are hidden. So, phone buzzes in a kid’s pocket or, God forbid, the ringer starts to ring, we’re hidden and now the shooter knows where we’re at. 

Too many people trying to text or call from the same location can slow down the bandwidth, make it more difficult for first responders, especially if these first responders aren’t on the same network and they’re having to communicate on their own phones, can make it more difficult to slow down their connections with each other. 

And parents rushing to the school. So, my son is two, when he’s older, if he were to text or call me and say there’s an active shooter situation, I’m getting in the car and I’m gonna go try to confront the person myself, and I’m probably not the only person that would have that urge. And this is actually something that happened. So, I was in a conversation a couple of weeks ago with some policymakers here in Georgia. And, unfortunately, last year at Apalachee High School in Georgia, we had a school shooting. And that point happened where caregivers, parents, they were getting messages and calls from their kids telling them what was happening, and they were rushing to get to the school to be outside so they could be there. Well, they congested the roadways and made it more difficult for first responders of police, ambulance to be able to get to the scene. 

So, those four points are reasons why the National School of Safety and Security Services, a lot of police forces, so the Association of Georgia State Sheriffs, other kind of law organizations also share that point that during an active shooter situation, we don’t want kids on their phones. We want them hidden, we want them secured. 

I also know how crippling that anxiety would be for a parent who, after a school shooting event has taken place, it would be really comforting to be able to get a message from your kid right away rather than have to wait a couple of hours until you could reunite with them at, like, a reunification center that they would set up. So, a couple of weeks ago when there was the school shooting at the Catholic elementary school in Minneapolis, there was the event, and then parents were able to reunify with their kids, but it wasn’t until some time later. That had to just be horrible. 

But we also know that the phones can make the situation itself more dangerous and it can make responding to the situation more difficult for our first responders. So for those kinds of reasons, the people who respond to those situations, they view student phones as a safety concern but in the wrong direction. So, they don’t view the phones as being something that’s gonna be particularly helpful. 

And so me and my colleagues, we’ve been surveying Georgia educators about their perceptions of our upcoming phone ban. So, as of earlier this morning, we’d received over 3,000 responses from educators, administrators across the state of Georgia. And we asked them in our survey, in addition to their views on the phone bans just in general, we asked them about, “How do you think this phone ban may or may not influence your school safety plan?” 92% of our respondents feel confident in their school’s safety plan. So that tells us that they trust the response and the communication that’s going to occur during an event. Only 16% agreed that students having access to their phones improves school safety. 84% of the educators who responded to our survey, 84% believe they disagree with that, they don’t think that student phones are helpful during an emergency situation. 90% disagree that banning students’ devices will compromise school safety. So they don’t think that the phones are going to be beneficial for school safety, they disagree that getting rid of them will compromise safety. And 90% disagree that banning students’ phones would compromise the school’s ability to respond effectively during an emergency. And 85% of our participants report that students’ off-task device of mobile phones during school contributes to increased amounts of bullying and other forms of victimization. 

So you take all that together – and I do believe that phones are a really important consideration for school safety, I just believe that it’s actually the phones that make things less safe, either physically or socially-emotionally for kids. And I know that that’s a hard talking point for some people to want to accept. There’s going be people who disagree with me probably pretty strongly on this. And my son, he’s two right now. You know, when he’s six, seven, eight, nine, off to school on his own, and if something were to happen at his school, in that moment, I would probably wish, “Man, I wish he had a phone on him so I could call him and I could find out if he’s okay.” But just from the data, and what the recommendations are from the first responders themselves, it calls a lot into question, the actual benefit of the phones for the students. They’re a comfort for the caregivers in the aftermath of being able to contact the students. But as far as actually making your kids safer, I don’t see the evidence to support that.

[Kris Perry]: And so much of what we’ve talked about today is the evidence. And as a researcher, the evidence that you’ve provided, as well as citing the health committee and the testimony of a colleague who also relied on evidence to make the case that phones can be not only distracting, but can add to high risk or unsafe situations. 

There’s a lot more I want to talk to you about – you’re a wealth of insight and information on school phone bans and digital distractions, but sadly we have to wrap up. That was Dr. Abe Flanigan on what drives digital distraction, how students and educators feel about school phone bans, and whether school phone restrictions actually work to improve student learning and distraction. 

You’ll find links to related resources on the show notes. Subscribe to Screen Deep, leave us a review, and share this episode with parents, educators, and anyone else working to raise kids in a digital world. Screen Deep is produced by Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development. I’m Kris Perry. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.