The Picture of Smartphones at School is Not a Dire One and the Picture of Student Competence is a Bright One

Authors

Victor R. Lee, Utah State UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Learning, Culture and Social Interaction

Volume

21

Publisher

Elsevier BV

Publication Date

4-19-2019

First Page

1

Last Page

11

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Abstract

In the United States, where I am based, one would get the impression that smartphones are a dangerous drug. Adults worry about smartphone addiction, the correlation of depression with smartphone usage, and an excess amount of screen time (e.g., Elhai, Levine, Dvorak, & Hall, 2016; Duke & Montag, 2017; Škařupová, Ólafsson, & Blinka, 2017). News headlines appear about technology moguls who will not allow their own children to have their own mobile device despite they themselves being the leaders in smartphone products and services. This then evokes guilt and causes anxiety for all the other American adults who are not multimillionaires from the tech industry yet allow their own children to use mobile devices. These alarmist headlines appear in regard to smartphone use in discretionary time. One could imagine the fear and angst that might result from headlines about research on permitted mobile phone use in the classroom. Fortunately, various researchers from Nordic countries have done some of that research and provided empirically grounded arguments for what happens when smartphones are actually used in classrooms. They did so across two countries and with clever instrumentation that could capture what students were seeing on their phones in a way that gave options for students to choose what not to disclose to the research team. Americans can breathe a sigh of relief and look to this special issue for signs of what happens.

Recommended Citation

Lee, Victor R. "The Picture of Smartphones at School Is Not a Dire One and the Picture of Student Competence Is a Bright One." Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, vol. 21, 2019, pp. 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2019.04.001