Smartphone Use and Academic Performance: First Evidence from Longitudinal Data

Simon Amez, Sunčica Vujić (), Lieven De Marez () and Stijn Baert

Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium from Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration

Abstract: To study the causal impact of smartphone use on academic performance, we collected—for the first time worldwide—longitudinal data on students’ smartphone use and educational performance. For three consecutive years we surveyed all students attending classes in eleven different study programmes at two Belgian universities on general smartphone use and other drivers of academic achievement. These survey data were merged with the exam scores of these students. We analysed the resulting data by means of panel data random effects estimation controlling for unobserved individual characteristics. A one standard deviation increase in overall smartphone use results in a decrease of 0.349 points (out of 20) and a decrease of 2.616 percentage points in the fraction of exams passed.

Keywords: smartphone use; academic performance; longitudinal data; causality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2019-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-pay and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://wps-feb.ugent.be/Papers/wp_19_986.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Smartphone Use and Academic Performance: First Evidence from Longitudinal Data (2019)
Working Paper: Smartphone Use and Academic Performance: First Evidence from Longitudinal Data (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rug:rugwps:19/986

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium from Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nathalie Verhaeghe ().