From Smartphones to Smart Students: Learning vs. Distraction Using Smartphones in the Classroom

We investigate the impact of using smartphones in the classrooms on students’ academic performance. We collaborated with a vocational school in China to randomly allocate students taking Chinese verbal lectures into one of four experimental conditions: (i) smartphones banned, (ii) smartphones allowed and used at will by students without guidance, (iii) smartphones allowed and used at will by students with teachers prompting students to use the smartphones to assist instruction, and (iv) smartphones banned with teachers prompting students to use a paper-based aid to assist instruction. We measured the academic performance gains of students by comparing their scores from identical tests taken at the beginning and the end of the lectures. Our findings indicate that allowing students to use smartphones at will in the classroom without guidance reduced their performance gain compared with when smartphones were banned. However, performance gain increased significantly when teachers asked students to use smartphones to assist with instruction. Students using the paper-based aid instruction performed similarly to those with banned smartphones. To delve into the underlying mechanisms that explain these findings, we analyzed video recordings of the classes to track students’ time spent learning versus being distracted with or without using smartphones. We found that the increased performance gain when smartphones were used to assist instruction came from the marginal benefit associated with smartphone-assisted learning outweighing the negative effect associated with smartphone-induced distraction. We also found that allowing smartphones into the classroom to aid instruction can help bridge educational gaps between male and female students and between low- and high-performing students. However, smartphones in the classroom may also induce a rich-get-richer dynamic by which students in information technology majors or from urban areas benefit more compared with those in non–information technology majors or born in rural areas. Our work contributes to the literature on technology-assisted learning and offers implications for teachers, school administrators, and policymakers to develop policies for smartphone use in classrooms.