How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Cell Phones

Cat on the Phone

In the past I wrote about some big problems I have with cell phones:

1. Students are rude with their cell phones
2. Cell-phone bans cause students significant anxiety.

Science is the best way to understand the universe and solve our problems; I wanted to tackle this problem scientifically. So I applied The Method.

First step: ask an answerable question. This is a bit harder than it might at first seem, since whatever question I ask will need some definitions so that it can be answered. Simply asking, "What is best?" is not sufficient unless we all agree on what "best" is. So here is what I came up with:

How much cell-phone use in class results in the greatest academic achievement, course engagement, and student satisfaction?

That question has three measurable outcomes, as long as I define how I will measure those results. So for the purposes of this experiment I used the following operational definitions:

• Academic achievement was measured by overall course grade (points out of 1000).
• Course engagement was measured by counting good-questions asked per class.
• Student Satisfaction was measured by an end-of-course evaluation by students.

The next step is to do background research so I read a multitude of articles about cell-phones and attention, cell-phones and learning, anxiety and learning, cell-phones and anxiety, and many other permutations of the key-words: cell-phone, learning, anxiety, engagement, classroom, and teaching. After weeks of literature review I thought I was ready to design my study.

Since I was teaching three sections of Introduction to Psychology on the same day that semester. I planned a different cell-phone policy for each class and put the relevant information in the syllabus.

VERBOTEN!

1. Verboten: "There will be NO cell-phone use during class. Phones must be off or on silent, remember that vibrations are sounds, turn your phone off.. If I see your phone out I will take it and put it on my desk for the duration of class. If you are expecting an emergency call inform the caller ahead of time to wait and call after class time, or do not come to class until your anxiety about your potential emergency has been resolved. After your third offense I will begin to penalize your course grade. " (Note: Thankfully no students called my bluff on the harshness of this policy.)

2. Permissive: There was no statement about cell-phones in the syllabus and I ignored completely any use or ringing of cell-phones.

3. Interval: "The class will be organized into roughly 20-minute blocks of activity (20 minutes of lecture, 20 minutes of video, 20 minutes of group work, 20 minutes of an in-class activity, etc.). During these times you may not use your cell-phone, not even for texting. However, between blocks there will be 2-5 minutes of transition time during which you are free to check your messages, send a tweet, update your status, or whatever it is you do on your phones. I will make clear announcements about when it is cell-time and when it is class-time before and after these transitions."

I generated a lot of usable data from this semester and went about analyzing the results. As far as academic achievement was concerned there was no significant difference between all three courses. The Interval section had significantly greater course engagement and student satisfaction (even out scoring the cell-phone permissive section). So to interpret and speculate a bit, I think this shows that good students are still good students regardless of cell-phone policy (they probably weren't using their phones even when allowed) and bad students are still bad students even if they aren't texting. But, students engage with the course more when they are not anxious about their missed messages while remaining free from texts for large blocks of class time. I also speculate that student satisfaction is directly influenced by higher classroom engagement.

The last step will be to share my results, which I suppose I am doing here, but I'm also preparing a manuscript to share with the larger scholarship of teaching and learning community. In the mean time I have adopted the interval policy in all of my courses since. Thank you Science!

Cell Phone Anxiety: Extended Edition

Yesterday I posted some research about cell phone anxiety. You may have noticed that while I referenced a science journal article I didn't talk much about the results. Indeed, the only results I listed were descriptive (basic counting that describes a behavior) and qualitative (as opposed to quantitative). This is because of some fundamental flaws with the data as described in the article. So for those of you interested in such things here is the extended review enumerating three big problems I had with the data:

1. Sampling Error. The author state that they began with 47 participants but 24 had dropped out or otherwise been disqualified before the start of the experiment.  The problem is we can't be sure if there was some other extraneous variable contributing to the high attrition rate. For example, if those 24 dropped out because the idea of being without their cell phone for 3 or 5 days was too threatening then the study missed the opportunity to measure their anxiety. Or maybe not. The thing is that we don't, and can't, know the  possible confound of the sample selection.
2. Median Split. The authors used a median split (M=92) to determine high- vs low- texting participants. The problem here is that someone with 91 texts per day is in one group while someone with 93 is in another. Sure the line has to be drawn somewhere, but when you have a small sample size, it is hard to distinguish the difference between groups with a median split, especially if data is clustered near the median (although we don't know if that was the case here). A better solution might be to use thirds so you have a high-, moderate, and low-texting groups, which might lead to more meaningful comparisons between high- and low-.
3. Low Sample Size. Of course this is the big one. With only 23 participants stretched across four groups there simply is not enough data for meaningful statistical analysis, not with humans anyway. When doing animal research your samples are so homogeneous (there is little individual difference between rats) that you can get away with small sample sizes. In fact to do regression the rule of thumb I'd always heard was that you'd need at least 60 per group. That might be hard to get for some researchers and there are statistical tricks that get used (like bootstrapping) to work around that number. But for this study, the sample is just way to small and, to be fair, the authors acknowledge this in the discussion.

That said the  lit review and theory in the paper were good. Some of the descriptive and qualitative results were interesting. So while statistically almost meaningless, I feel as though the paper is still a valuable contribution to the relatively barren landscape of research into cell phone restriction anxiety.

• Dorothy Skierkowski & Rebecca M. Wood (2012). To text or not to text? The importance of text messaging among college-aged youth Computers in Human Behavior, 28 (2), 744-756 DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2011.11.023

Cell Phone Anxiety

Editor's Selection Icon Earlier I wrote about cell phone rudeness in the classroom. In that post I mentioned that asking students to go without cell phones is like asking them to go without friends. That statement generated a lot of interest from faculty and students int he comments, on facebook, and in person so I thought I would share a little bit of research that backs up my statement.

In a recently published article (see below for reference) Dorothy Skierkowski and Rebecca Wood tracked college-aged youth's anxiety over a 3- or 5-day texting restriction. That is to say, for three or five days participants in the study were not allowed to use text messaging. In spite of the studies extremely small sample size (n=23), they had some interesting results. They found that participants that were identified has high-volume texters (greater than 92 texts per day on average) thought about texting an average of 47 times per day during the restricted period. Even the low-volume texters thought about it 23 times on average. In psychology we might consider those repetitive worrisome thoughts as rumination, a hallmark of anxiety.

Another important finding from this study involved the open-ended survey responses from students collected during the restriction. The authors sum those responses with the following sentence:

 "Clearly, asking students to restrict their texting behavior made a powerful impact on most study participants, to the extent that some were not able to refrain from doing so, a large number believed their relationships had worsened over the duration of the study, and most endured the effects of texting restriction with a moderate to high degree of annoyance, anxiety, and/or stress. "

So it is because of this and similar studies that I think we need to review the idea of the cell-phone ban in the classroom setting. While this study involved restricted use over a matter of days, it was still observed that students frequently thought about texting and failed to comply with text-messaging restrictions. So my fear is that banning cell phones might be just as detrimental to learning as allowing them in class. I decided to do my own experiment to gather data on how cell phones impact learning in MY classroom. I let you know how that turned out in a future post.

UPDATE: If  you are interested in statistics you might like my follow-up to this post which more closely examines the statistics in this article.

Dorothy Skierkowski & Rebecca M. Wood (2012). To text or not to text? The importance of text messaging among college-aged youth Computers in Human Behavior, 28 (2), 744-756 DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2011.11.023

Cell Phone Rudeness

Some students text in class. While this is rude and disrespectful towards me, it doesn't really disrupt class or the learning of students nearby. Or does it? There have been two incidents in a previous semester that demonstrated a higher degree of rudeness and I thought I'd share.

During a test I noticed a student texting. I tend not to assume my students are cheating, and simply told her that there is no texting during the test. Not only did she apologize and put her phone away, several other students put their phones away. They did not seem to be actively testing (I do watch my students take exams) but obviously they were anticipating the possibility of a text message; doesn't everyone recognize that communicating (whatever the medium) during a test is verboten? The real issue is that 15 minutes later I had to tell the first student a SECOND time to stop texting.

M: You understand why it is not ok to text during the test right?
C: But I wasn't texting about the test.
M: That's even worse. If you were cheating at least I'd know you cared about the test!

The second incident involved a student who came to me outside the classroom just before a test. She explained to me that she wasn't going to be able to stay the whole time because she had a doctor's appointment scheduled opposite class and she wanted to know if she could take the test another time. I was about to tell her that she should've told me sometime sooner because she COULD have taken then test early, and that test or no it is a bad idea to schedule a doctor's visit during class. I was about to tell her that, but I didn't get the chance because as soon as I started answering her she whipped out her phone and began responding to a text message she had gotten. I stopped mid-sentence and went on in to class.

Students texting on a break from class

I think it is unreasonable for me to expect students to turn their phones off entirely or even to ignore text messages they get in class. I mean this is the new thing, and phones (for good or ill) are integrated into their lives. Asking our students to go without cell phones is like asking them not to have friends. In fact, I've gathered some experimental data on classroom cell-phone behavior, cell-phone anxiety and student learning which I'll analyze and reveal in a future post. Fortunately MOST of my students are responsible with their phones. Just... please don't be rude.