Are phones making kids dumber? New data suggests the answer is yes

For years across many developed nations including the U.S., students’ test scores have steadily fallen. The sharp decline started around 2012, right when smartphones and social media started to dominate teenagers’ lives.

A new study from the Program for International Student Assessment found a link between phone usage and declining academic performance. The organization evaluates math, reading and science skills in 15-year-olds in almost 80 countries every three years.

The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson didn’t buy the argument that phones were the cause of academic decline for a while, but this study changed his mind.

“I believed the story that over time, people were generally getting smarter,” Thompson says. “But [PISA] is really the gold standard when it comes to looking at student achievement, especially in math and reading and science. And it has pretty conclusive evidence.”

Is COVID-19 related to declining scores at all? Or is it all smartphone-centric?

“My answer would be that it's a tanking within a tanking. You already saw student scores declining between 2012 and 2020. We all know what happened in 2020. The pandemic caused schools to be closed, not just in the U.S., but around the world.

“Just about every single country saw declines in student achievement between 2019 and 2022 in PISA. So yes, learning loss is real, but also there is a real longer-term decline in PISA scores.”

We know that increased phone time negatively impacts teens’ mental health. Did that show up in the study at all?

“You see that students who spend more time staring at their phone, they do worse in school. They tend to distract other students around them. They also tend to feel worse about their life. All of this was found by PISA and has been found by other international surveys.

“I had long understood and believed this idea that phones were at the heart of what we see to be a rising crisis of teen anxiety. And here, I think what's disturbing is that it's not just teen anxiety that seems to be increasing. Phones also seem to be taking away from student achievement.

“And that's because not only are they a weapon of mass comparison — you constantly see how beautiful and successful and lucky everyone is around you. They're also a weapon of mass distraction.

“I mean, how exciting is a phone compared to a BC calculus class? I took BC calculus. I wasn't very good at it, but I certainly didn't have this incredibly exciting device to constantly distract me from the hard lessons of calculus.”

Is there any movement to prevent students from having their phones in schools?

“There absolutely is a movement. And I think this movement is nascent. I think it is an experiment. I'm not sure we know for sure if taking phones away from students in classrooms will suddenly reverse this trend.

“I suspect it might, though, and I think that the best way to think about this new experiment of taking phones away from kids in high schools is that we're already running a global experiment on our minds and in particular in the minds of young people.

“We have discovered that by injecting classrooms with phones, we have seen a dramatic increase in this sort of negative relationship between device use and life satisfaction, happiness, and this decline in achievement. So I think we should run the opposite experiment.”

Julia Corcoran produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Chris Bentley. Grace Griffin adapted it for the web.