Rethinking Smart Phone Bans in the Classroom: Lessons from Ohio and Pakistan's Similar Policies Toward Divergent Ends

• In Event: Digital tools in education: opportunities, gaps, and policies shaping learning in classrooms

Proposal

Ohio House Bill 250, unanimously passed by the Ohio General Assembly in April 2024 and effective this current school year (Ohio General Assembly, 2024), follows trends globally (UNESCO, 2023) expressing that “you improve student academic performance and reduce bullying and disciplinary issues when you get phones out of the classroom” (Carey, 2024). Specifically, the legislation mandates that all districts develop policies restricting cell phone usage during school hours (Ohio General Assembly, 2024). The stated aims of this move include improving students’ social interaction, academic engagement, and well-being (Carey, 2024). Similarly, but in the distinct context of Pakistan, the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Elementary and Secondary Education Department imposed a comprehensive ban on mobile phone usage by students and staff at school in early 2024 (The Express Tribune, 2024). The policy aims to enhance student learning and addresses parental concerns about teachers’ preoccupation with phones in the classroom setting (2024).

With increasing digitalization, mobile phones have become "personal, portable, and pedestrian" gadgets (Ito et al., 2005) that blur the boundaries between various social spaces that school students navigate (Kolb, 2008). The extent of this technological penetration is both appreciated (Kumar et al., 2010) and criticized in literature. However, there is a global trend towards banning smartphones in schools, a measure currently adopted by one in four countries (UNESCO, 2023). Acknowledging classroom phone bans as a global policy phenomenon aiming to produce a range of outcomes for students, we ask if the policy of banning phones can be effective at producing the range of outcomes stated by policymakers, and if unique socio-political contexts in which these policies are implemented affect their effectiveness.

To address this question, this paper compares policies in the U.S. and Pakistan grounded in policy design theory (Schneider & Ingram, 1997) to identify the empirical policy components expressed in each distinct socio-political context. Analyzing this shared policy through the juxtaposition of these unique socio-political contexts enables the exploration of tacit assumptions, which we will frame as social facts (Durkheim, 2013), underlying mobile bans to improve student outcomes. Additionally, we seek to move beyond the debate on the positive or negative externalities of mobile phone usage, typically framed within psychological or behavioral paradigms. This paper specifically identifies the limitations of conceptualizing mobile phone bans in classrooms as a panacea for academic, behavioral, and wellness concerns, suggesting that it may be a policy distraction.

The paper aligns with the conference theme – Envisioning Education in a Digital Society – in two important ways. First, we recognize the global urgency to address the impact of phones on classroom learning, then critique the widespread blanket bans on mobiles and the assumptions that this prohibition will effectively address issues like cyberbullying, addiction, and academic achievement adequately. Second, proposing a curriculum-based solution, we envision education in a digital society needing flexible policy frameworks. These should balance the benefits and challenges of phones in the classroom by aligning policy aims with nuanced approaches tailored to local contexts that address the needs of students now and in the future.

The literature on school phone policies since 2020 generally situates phones either as useful learning tools or, more often, a distraction linked to undesirable outcomes for students, including compromised academic achievement (Kates et al., 2018). Some authors, such as Selwyn & Aagaard (2020), have suggested blanket cell phone bans by schools pose a “curtailment” to emerging educational technologies (p. 8). Though banning phones in the classroom is a popular policy, it is unlikely that such a prohibition will support the diverse range of student outcomes associated with phones (e.g. social-emotional (Smale et al., 2021), academic (Kates et al., 2018), and well-being (Li et al., 2015)). After all, students leave school each day and return home with their devices and might reasonably be expected to use a cell phone as a tool in future employment.

To ground this work theoretically, we leverage Durkheim’s (2013) theory of “social facts” (p. 1) to understand cell phones and the norms, behaviors, and coercive power they carry. By identifying the social facts associated with cell phones, we can begin to hypothesize more specifically about their effect on the classroom to better inform future policy. Additionally, in envisioning future policies, we leverage Schneider & Ingram’s (1997) policy design theory, which defines nine empirical components of policy formulation. Like Durkheim’s social facts, policy design theory provides useful categories for making data-informed decisions when constructing new policy.

In this work, we recognize how these policies situated in specific contexts reflect and reinforce cultural attitudes toward authority, communication, and educational technologies, and reveal diversity in both the reasons for and the desired outcomes from phone bans in classrooms. Similarly, national contexts reveal the historical, cultural, and political factors that bring about policies and their aims. This specific work, however, we view as transcending national contexts to provide conceptual resources for educating in a world where cell phones are ever-present.

Like Selwyn & Aagaard (2020), we view this trend of banning cell phones in classrooms as a precious moment for policy analysts and researchers. We move beyond critique to promote policy that acknowledges both the challenges phones pose in the classroom and that phones are an inevitable tool of modern life. In this way, we offer a vision for curriculum components to develop productive habits in students regarding their devices. Additionally, framing the behaviors and coercion associated with phone use as social facts (Durkheim, 2013) while leveraging Schneider & Ingram’s (1997) policy design theory, we offer approaches to interpreting policy contexts and creating policy informed by data, providing more targeted solutions to achieve a growing list of desired aims.

Our research acknowledges global preference for mobile phone bans as an opportunity to undertake a comparative study as a critical approach to propose policy alignment with desired outcomes. Additionally, the study recognizes the social embeddedness of mobile phone usage to introduce recommendations for a curriculum-based approach. This can help mitigate the negative effects of cell phones in the classroom while preparing students to engage with these tools more productively.

Authors

• Thomas Capretta, The Ohio State University

• Muhammad Zulqurnain Ul Haq Qazi, College of Education & Human Ecology