Mere Presence of a Cell Phone: Effects on Academic Ability

Jaimey E Hintz,Vanessa C Boila,Tru E Kwong

doi:10.29173/bsuj492

Abstract

Prior research has suggested that cell phone use in the classroom and during learning-related tasks is detrimental to academic performance. Recently, the mere presence of a cell phone has been found to negatively affect relationships and to impair performance on learning and cognitive tasks. This study explored whether the presence (visibility without use) of a cell phone negatively impacts one’s performance on tests measuring preexisting academic ability. The study evaluated 45 participants; some were enrolled in an introductory psychology course, and others were members of the public. Three subtests from the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT-4) were completed: spelling, sentence comprehension, and mathematics. During testing, half of the participants had cell phones, and the other half did not. Statistical analyses revealed no significant difference between the cell phone-present and cell phone-absent group on the sentence comprehension (p=.52), spelling (p=.07), and mathematics subtest (p=.11). Unexpectedly, a non-significant trend was observed in the opposite direction; that is, the cell phone-present group outperformed the cell phone-absent group on all subtests. Therefore, the original hypothesis suggesting that the cell phone-present group would be significantly poorer at demonstrating preexisting skills on tests of academic ability in comparison to the cell phone-present group was not supported.

Highlights

Prior research has suggested that cell phone use in the classroom and during learning-related tasks is detrimental to academic performance
After the initial outlier check, six outliers were detected. Four of these outliers were detected in the cell phone-present group, and the remaining two outliers were observed in the other group
When a cell phone was present during testing, the demonstration of preexisting skills on the sentence comprehension subtest (M = 100.45, SD = 10.17) was not significantly different from the cell phone-absent group who completed the sentence comprehension test (M = 98.18, SD = 12.96), t(42) = 0.65, p = .52, d = 0.19, 95% confidence interval (CI) [-4.82, 9.36]

Summary

Introduction

Prior research has suggested that cell phone use in the classroom and during learning-related tasks is detrimental to academic performance. The present study explored whether the presence of a cell phone negatively impacts one’s performance on tests measuring preexisting academic ability. The original hypothesis suggesting that the cell phone-present group would be significantly poorer at demonstrating preexisting skills on tests of academic ability in comparison to the cell phone-present group was not supported. Due to the lack of data about the relationship between technology policies and learning, the mere presence of cell phones in the classroom is important to investigate. This topic is important to investigate because technology in academic environments is becoming increasingly commonplace. The more participants reported sending and receiving text messages throughout the course of a day, the lower their reported grade-point average (GPA); secondly, the further along participants were in their program, the less often they sent, received, or checked their cell phone for inbound messages (Harman & Sato, 2011)

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion