Some commentators suggest that no real ban was in effect. I returned to Sara Abrahamsson’s article to confirm the following:
Schools where students must hand over their phones in the morning, and therefore cannot access them during recess, are considered to have a strict policy against smartphones. Schools where students are allowed to access their phones during breaks but are required to turn them on, for example in silent mode (mode) during lessons, are classified as having a lenient smartphone policy. For mental health, the effect between schools with a more lenient and stricter policy is relatively similar, as shown in Figure 10.17. Four years after the ban, girls had 3.48 and 2.3 fewer visits for specialized care related to psychological symptoms and illnesses in schools with a lenient and strict policy, respectively (p-values 0.036 and 0.068). 18 For harassment, there is not much difference depending on the type of policy implemented regarding harassment, neither for girls as shown in Figure 11, nor for boys as shown in Figure A21 in the appendix.
However, girls attending a college that introduces a strict no-smartphone policy experience a 0.12 standard deviation increase in their GPA. This estimate is significant four years after the ban at the 5% level (p-value 0.032). Additionally, girls attending a middle school with a strict policy had significantly higher teacher-assigned test scores, by 0.08 and 0.14 standard deviations, three and four years after the ban (p-values 0.075 and 0.011). These results, presented in panels A and B of Figure 12, show that the overall average and teacher-set average grades for girls improve after the implementation of a strict ban on smartphones in schools.
…However, there are no detectable differences in the likelihood of attending a college high school between schools with strict and more lenient policies.
In other words, there were strict bans and they had only modest effects, even compared to less strict bans. On page 34, Figure 2, you will see that 200 schools were subject to strict bans, just under half of the total (not all cases are easy to classify). Also note that while banning smartphones could go a long way toward addressing mental health issues, we should still see a change in mental health diagnoses, following the bans, but that is not the case.
Here is my original post on the subject.
