Ill Communication: Technology, Distraction & Student Performance

Louis-Philippe Beland and Richard Murphy

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: This paper investigates the impact of schools banning mobile phones on student test scores. By surveying schools in four English cities regarding their mobile phone policies and combining it with administrative data, we find that student performance in high stakes exams significantly increases post ban. We use a difference in differences (DID) strategy, exploiting variations in schools' autonomous decisions to ban these devices, conditioning on a range of student characteristics and prior achievement. Our results indicate that these increases in performance are driven by the lowest-achieving students. This suggests that restricting mobile phone use can be a low-cost policy to reduce educational inequalities.

Keywords: Mobile phones; technology; student performance; productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I28 J24 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-ict, nep-lma and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Ill Communication: Technology, distraction & student performance (2016)
Working Paper: Ill communication: technology, distraction & studentperformance (2015)
Working Paper: Ill Communication: Technology, Distraction & Student Performance (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1350

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