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‘Close to zero impact’: US study casts doubt on effect of phone ban in schools (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 3 days ago by Powderhorn@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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Strict bans on mobile phones in schools have “close to zero” impact on student learning and show no evidence of improvements in attendance or online bullying, a study has found.

Researchers at US universities including Stanford and Duke looked at nearly 1,800 US schools where students’ phones were kept in locked pouches and found little or no differences in outcomes compared with similar schools without strict bans.

The report concluded that among schools instituting a ban: “For academic achievement, average effects on test scores are consistently close to zero.”

The results will come as a disappointment to teaching unions and campaigners in England who backed the government’s recent move to restrict the use of mobile phones in schools. A ban is likely to come into force next year.

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[–] spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

As an aside, is the Guardian becoming a shit rag? Lately (last year or two) I’ve noticed a huge dip in their quality.

what I've heard previously is that the Guardian's UK edition sucks, and that the US edition is somewhat better, but at this point I'm comfortable lumping them together.

the article that flipped the "assume everything they publish is bullshit" switch for me was Number of AI chatbots ignoring human instructions increasing, study says from a few months ago.

it's written with the tone you'd expect from "serious" journalism:

AI chatbots and agents disregarded direct instructions, evaded safeguards and deceived humans and other AI, according to research funded by the UK government-funded AI Security Institute (AISI). The study, shared with the Guardian, identified nearly 700 real-world cases of AI scheming and charted a five-fold rise in misbehaviour between October and March, with some AI models destroying emails and other files without permission.

but if you read carefully...it's tweets. it's just fucking tweets. they released a "study" that is a graph of "tweets over time" and claimed that it says something about the prevalence of AI "going rogue".

and in particular, they take the one story about the Meta executive who allowed an AI "agent" to delete all their emails, notice that there's a bunch of tweets discussing it, and conflate that with an increased occurrence of it happening.

it's the equivalent of saying that there were 10,000 moon landings in 1969 because you looked back at newspaper archives and found 10,000 "man lands on moon" headlines. just complete fucking amateur hour data analysis, and for the Guardian to publish it uncritically is shameful.

[–] its_me_xiphos@beehaw.org 2 points 1 day ago

That is an excellent breakdown. I'm glad I'm not the only one noticing these posts. Poor data analysis being published or claims taken at face value.

I interacted with the Guardian editorial team once in the UK. I had a dataset on academic censoring and we were focusing on sharing the qualitative responses. All seemed on the up and up but we never moved forward for a variety of reasons with the story. Editors and the journalist were great. Tough questions, good insight, etc. Seemed like a good outlet. But that was earlier 2025 and in less than a year, I read that trash we are discussing.