The standardized test scores of American students had been rising for decades. Then they began to slide, dropping to their lowest point in two decades in 2023 and 2024.
This is not a problem confined to the United States. Worldwide, the performance of 15-year-olds in math, reading and science reached a nadir in 2022.
These dismal results are at least partly a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Missed instruction during those years may still be having an impact on academic performance.
But that’s only part of the story. The decline in test scores started well before the pandemic, around 2012. One obvious culprit is smartphones, which became popular just as test scores started to decline. Since 2017, I’ve been doing research on what smartphones do to our mental health, and I recently started to study how they affect academic performance. The negative impact of smartphones on learning is one reason many school districts have instituted a bell-to-bell ban on smartphones in K-12 education, including all public schools in New York State, which also banned students’ personal laptops, tablets and smart watches.
That’s progress, especially when 83 percent of K-12 teachers surveyed by one major union think that smartphone bans are a good idea. But they are not a complete solution, because phones are not the only electronic devices students use at school. These days, nearly every middle and high school student — and a good number in the elementary grades as well — brings a laptop or tablet to school and uses it at home for homework.
Many of these devices are provided by schools. You might think that these school-issued devices allow only a limited number of functions, like access to classroom Canvas pages and Google Docs. If you assumed that, you would be wrong.
Sylvie McNamara, a parent of a ninth grader in Washington, D.C., wrote in Washingtonian magazine that her son was spending every class period watching TV shows and playing games on his school-issued laptop. He often had no idea what topics his classes were covering. When she asked school administrators to restrict her son’s use of the laptop, they resisted, saying the device was integral to the curriculum.
In a survey of American teenagers by the nonprofit Common Sense Media, one-fourth admitted they had seen pornographic content during the school day. Almost half of that group saw it on a school-issued device. Students watching porn in class doesn’t just affect the students themselves — picture being a teenager in math class trying to concentrate on sine and cosine while sitting behind that display of flesh. It is disturbing on a number of levels.
Even when laptop abuse doesn’t reach this point, it still consumes a substantial amount of instructional time. One study of Michigan State college students — nearly all legal adults presumably more capable of focusing their attention than young teens — found that they spent nearly 40 percent of class time scrolling social media, checking email or watching videos on their laptops — anything but their classwork.
School laptops are also distracting at home. Many allow unfettered access to YouTube, tempting students to watch an endless loop of videos instead of doing their homework. Just the other day, my daughter told me she was watching the violent cop show “The Rookie” on her school laptop at home. Apparently the device did not block access to the streaming service Disney+. How can we expect 13-year-olds to focus on their assignments when a vast library of entertaining video content is a tab away?
It seems ridiculous to have to say this, but digital distraction is terrible for academic performance. The more time college students spent doing something else on their laptops during class, the lower their exam scores, even after accounting for academic ability.
This also applies to teenagers around the world. A 2023 UNESCO report concluded that too much device use can hurt academic performance, mostly because of increased distraction and engagement in nonacademic activities.
In a study published in October in The Journal of Adolescence, I found that standardized test scores in math, reading and science fell significantly more in countries where students spent more time using electronic devices for leisure purposes during the school day than they did in countries where they spent less time.
The situation in Finland, once known for having one of the best school systems in the world, is telling. In 2022, teenagers in Finland admitted to using their devices during the school day for noneducational purposes for nearly 90 minutes. Perhaps as a result, the test scores of Finnish students plummeted between 2006 and 2022. In countries such as Japan, where students spend less than a half-hour on devices for leisure during the school day, academic performance has remained fairly steady, especially in math and science.
If tablets and laptops are behind even a small portion of the decline in academic performance, parents and educators will need to work together to find solutions. At the moment, parents are virtually powerless: They can’t install parental control software on school devices. Nevertheless, many districts try to foist responsibility back onto parents by telling them, as my children’s district does, that “there is no substitute for parental supervision. Be knowledgeable of what sites your child goes to online.” How, exactly, are we supposed to do that when we can’t install control software and given that it’s not possible to hover over our teenagers every minute?
If school districts want to improve their test scores — and most are desperate to do so — changing the way students use school-issued devices is critical. To start, school I.T. departments should lock down devices much more securely so students can’t use them to watch TV shows, play games or continuously consume videos. Whatever efforts schools are making in that direction right now are frequently evaded by tech-savvy students.
There should be districtwide policies that specifically disallow these types of uses and instruct teachers to embed educational videos on the classroom page instead of giving students unlimited access to YouTube.
Districts and teachers should also consider scaling back on the number of assignments that require a device to complete in the first place. A paper math worksheet or a handwritten response to a reading assignment is one less opportunity for kids to use a device chock-full of digital distractions, and one less opportunity to cut and paste an essay written by ChatGPT.
Parents should also have the option to opt out. I’ve spoken with many parents whose children struggle to focus while using laptops, only for school administrators to tell them the devices are required. Angela Arsenault, a state representative in Vermont, is planning to introduce a bill to give parents the ability to opt their children out of receiving school-issued devices. A version of the bill was first introduced in 2015, a stark illustration of how long this has been an issue.
Districts could even eliminate school electronic devices entirely. Many parents and teachers might protest that this would have an adverse impact on learning or tilt the scales in favor of wealthier students who have access to their own devices, but several studies suggest it might instead improve learning. One study of nearly 300,000 fourth and eighth graders in the United States found that students who spent more time using digital devices in language arts classes performed worse on reading tests. A 2018 meta-analysis found that reading on paper, compared with reading digitally, led to significantly better comprehension among students, from elementary school to college. Across 24 studies, college students who took handwritten notes were 58 percent more likely to get A’s in their courses than those who typed notes on laptops. In contrast, students who typed notes were 75 percent more likely to fail the course than those who wrote them by hand.
Although it once seemed like a good idea to give every child his or her own device, it’s clear that those policies have been a failure. It may be possible to harness the power of school devices more judiciously, with little to no device use in lower grades, and high school students given laptops strictly limited to relevant apps. We could go further, creating completely device-free schools with rare exceptions for students with special needs. It would be back to the textbooks, paper and pencil of previous eras — when the most significant classroom distraction was students passing notes.
Many adults struggle to concentrate on work when social media, shopping and movies are just a click away. Imagine how much more difficult it is for a 16-year-old, much less an 11-year-old, to focus in the same situation. Asking students to drill down on their schoolwork amid an array of digital distractions isn’t just bad for test scores; it is inimical to learning.
And it is fundamentally unfair to our children.
Jean M. Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, is the author of “10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World.”
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