Ill communication: technology, distraction & studentperformance

Louis-Philippe Beland and Richard Murphy

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

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 lowestachieving 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)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2015-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-ict and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/62574/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Ill Communication: Technology, distraction & student performance (2016)
Working Paper: Ill Communication: Technology, Distraction & Student Performance (2015)
Working Paper: Ill Communication: Technology, Distraction & Student Performance (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:62574

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