Comment on Study finds smartphone bans in Dutch schools improved focus
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 month agoSure, I just don’t trust results from subjective studies, unless it’s tracking trends over time. So maybe if they had opinion polls like this before smartphones were a thing in classrooms, while smartphones were a thing, and after they were banned I’d trust the results somewhat. But if we’re just tracking an after-the-fact poll, it just feels like confirmation bias. I believe teachers have an incentive to overstate the impact of policies that give them more control, because they want to encourage more such policies, even if they aren’t effective at achieving tangible results.
So yeah, I distrust this type of study. I don’t think it’s necessarily worthless, I just don’t think many conclusions can be taken from it.
slackassassin@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
You can conclude that teachers experience a better classroom environment. There was also 1/3 that did observe academic improvement.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
I mostly care about longer term impacts. The ban has only been in place for a year and a half, so it’s really not much to go on.
slackassassin@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Short term and long term impacts are both worthy of study, surely.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Sure, but short term impacts are generally unreliable, since there are a lot of cases of coincidence, like a good policy having no immediate impact or a bad policy having the desired impact. Longer term studies account for that randomness.