Initial analysis of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) suggests that mobile phone bans might help with reducing student distraction in school. However, our examination of student outcomes and phone bans has revealed an inverse relationship: the more a country bans phones, the lower their PISA score. When controlling for gender, school behaviour and socio-economic status, phone bans are still negatively associated with PISA results in OECD countries. This blog post examines the relationship between achievement scores on PISA tests and mobile phone bans in schools.
Banning mobile phones in schools
The Secretary of State for Education’s recent announcement that mobile phone use is to be banned in English schools (DfE 2023) has stoked a debate about the value and practicality of such bans. A source of data on the effectiveness of mobile phone bans is from the OECD’s 2022 PISA data set – a triennial international assessment. Nearly 700,000 students in 81 OECD member countries participated in the 2022 survey (OECD 2023a). During the launch event of the 2022 UK PISA report, one of the authors of that report, commented that ‘the only policy negatively related to [student] distraction is banning mobile phones’ but added there was not enough evidence to warrant a complete ban (Policy Exchange, 2023). While the relationship between distraction and phone use is interesting, we examined PISA 2022 data to explore the relationships between academic achievement and phone bans in schools.
