How To Get Students To Stop Using Their Cellphones In Class

NPR:

Our Ideas series is exploring how innovation happens in education.

Almost all college students have a cellphone. They use them an average of eight to 10 hours a day and check them an average of every 15 to 20 minutes while they’re awake.

Heavier smartphone use has been linked to lower-quality sleep and lower GPAs — oh, are you getting a text right now?

I’ll wait.

Anyway, as I was saying, one professor at the University of Colorado Boulder has come up with a solution to smartphone distraction in one of his astronomy classes.

“I was stunned how well it worked,” Doug Duncan wrote in an email to fellow astronomy professors, which he shared with NPR Ed.

…

Should other professors follow Duncan’s lead? I asked Larry Rosen, a research psychologist and professor emeritus at California State University, Dominguez Hills. He studies smartphone use among college students. As simple as it sounds, Rosen doesn’t think simply incentivizing students to turn off their phones is a good strategy.

“It doesn’t get at the real underlying issue of why students are distracted,” he explains. “Most college students are heavy users who are going to get anxious and stressed within 10 or 15 minutes if they can’t check their phones.”

Read the whole story: NPR