Kids who own cellphones have poorer reading comprehension scores than those who don’t, researchers find

School cellphone bans might seem like a good way to improve learning for elementary school children, but new research published in Behavioral Sciences shows that simply owning a cellphone correlates with worse reading comprehension. Whether a child brings the phone to school or not made no difference on the same metric, the team of UCLA psychologists and researchers found.

"We found that there's no age at which you can give a child a phone that's better or worse for reading comprehension, so it's just having a phone at all," said lead author and UCLA psychology professor Patricia Greenfield. "That's true in third grade, and it's true in sixth grade."

The study came about as researchers sought to answer the question: Do cellphones interfere with the concentration required to perform well on academic tests? They focused on determining whether the acquisition of a phone was negatively related to reading comprehension performance on tests for third and sixth graders.

The widespread concern about the effect of cellphones on reading in elementary school children has led to surprisingly little experimental research. The authors note only two previous studies in elementary school children. One showed that texting benefits the skill of grasping meaning; the other showed texting to be a negative influence on basic reading mechanics at the letter and word level.

To conduct the new study, researchers obtained approval to test children's reading comprehension with and without phones on a group of culturally and linguistically diverse children in Antelope Valley public schools and Coptic Church schools in Los Angeles. County. Phones were normally allowed in both types of settings.

The children - some who owned a phone and others who did not - read short passages. Some children had a phone with them at school, while others did not. Researchers then tested them on what they understood about each passage. Students also filled out a survey about their cellphone ownership and use.

The researchers found a statistically significant relationship between owning a personal cellphone and lower reading scores - children who owned cellphones had poorer comprehension than those who did not. This negative relationship between phone ownership and reading scores held for students who spoke English at home and those who did not. Testing for distraction from phone notifications was not possible because the students received almost no notifications during the experiments. Furthermore, there was no difference in reading comprehension when phones were on desks or out of sight. The reported age at which a child acquired their first phone did not correlate with reading comprehension skill.

"The children who brought their phones to school had the same reading scores as children who did not have phones at school that day. So, it's ownership of a phone, not the immediate presence of one, that correlates with poorer reading comprehension at the elementary school level," said Greenfield.

The study found some good news for students who do not speak English at home. For students from non-English-speaking homes who had their own phone, reading comprehension was significantly better the earlier they started using their phone to text.

"If you have a phone and if you're from a family where English is not spoken at home, it's better for reading comprehension to start texting earlier rather than later," said Greenfield. "In fact, when students from Arabic- or Spanish-speaking homes began to text in second or third grade, by sixth grade they had reading comprehension scores similar to their peers who still did not have phones."

Although results suggest no academic effect of school bans through sixth grade, cell phone bans in the elementary grades should improve children's social skills and relationships by increasing in-person interaction with peers and teachers; this is an important area for future research.

Postgraduate research assistant Marola Hanna, doctoral student Rocio Burgos-Calvillo, and assistant research professor Laura Rhinehart, all of whom are at UCLA, are co-authors of the paper.

A grant from the Flora Family Foundation supported the study.