Friday News Roundup

Here’s your first Friday News Roundup for 2024!

It Sure Looks Like Phones Are Making Students Dumber (The Atlantic)

A few weeks ago The Atlantic reported that,

“For the past few years, parents, researchers, and the news media have paid closer attention to the relationship between teenagers’ phone use and their mental health. Researchers such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge have shown that various measures of student well-being began a sharp decline around 2012 throughout the West, just as smartphones and social media emerged as the attentional centerpiece of teenage life. Some have even suggested that smartphone use is so corrosive, it’s systematically reducing student achievement. I hadn’t quite believed that last argument – until now.”

…

“The Program for International Student Assessment, conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in almost 80 countries every three years, tests 15-year-olds in math, reading, and science. It is the world’s most famous measure of student ability.”

…

“The deeper, most interesting story [from the recent PISA report] is that test scores have been failing for years – even before the pandemic.”

…

“So what’s driving down student scores around the world? The PISA report offers three reasons to suspect that phones are a major culprit.”

“First, PISA finds that students who spend less than one hour of ‘leisure’ time on digital devices a day at school scored about 50 points higher in math than students whose eyes are glued to their screens more than five hours a day. This gap held even after adjusting for socioeconomic factors. For comparison, a 50-point decline in math scores is about four times larger than America’s pandemic-era learning loss in that subject.”

“Second, screens seem to create a general distraction throughout school, even for students who aren’t always looking at them. Andreas Schleicher, the director of the PISA survey, wrote that students who reported feeling distracted by their classmates’ digital habits scored lower in math. Finally, nearly half of students across the OECD said that they felt ‘nervous’ or ‘anxious’ when they didn’t have their digital devices near them. (On average, these students also said they were less satisfied with life.) This phone anxiety was negatively correlated with math scores.”

I’ve said this before, so I’ll say it again. Maybe the problem here is that we, as adult learning leaders, haven’t figured out how to use the smartphone to assist in a young person’s learning – like ever.

To support this view, here’s a news item from April of last year addressing the topic of how to make learning as addictive as social media:

How To Make Learning as Addictive as Social Media (TED)

Luis von Ahn, co-founder of Duolingo, said this from the TED stage:

“If you really want to deliver education to everyone, not only do you have to make it accessible, but also you have to make it so that people want to actually learn. And at the highest level, the way we’ve done this is by making the broccoli taste like dessert. I’ll say it another way. What we’ve done is that we’ve used the same psychological techniques that apps like Instagram, TikTok or mobile games use to keep people engaged, but in this case, we use them to keep people engaged but with education.”

“Let me give you some examples of these techniques. One of the most powerful ones is the notion of a streak. What a streak is, is it’s just a counter that measures the number of days that you’ve used the product consecutively. You just take that number, you put it very prominently in your product and then people come back every day. And the reason people come back every day is because, well, if they don’t come back, that number resets to zero and people don’t want to lose their streak. It works. Now, on the one side, streaks have been criticized for, for example, getting teens addicted to Snapchat. But in the case of an educational app, streaks get people to come back to study every day. Now, to give you an idea of the power of streaks, in the case of Duolingo, we have over three million daily active users that have a streak longer than 365.”

“Another important mechanism to get people to come back to your product are notifications….Do you know what is the best time to send people a notification? I’ll tell you. It’s 24 hours after they used the product last. There’s an easy explanation. If you were free yesterday at 3 PM, you’re probably free today at 3 PM as well….Now, at some point it occurred to us, if we’re stopping to send people notifications, we should let them know. So we started sending this notification to people saying ‘Hey, these reminders don’t seem to be working. We’ll stop sending them for now.’ You know what people do when they get this notification? They come back.”

“And this is a really important point, let me say this. I don’t actually believe that there’s a way to make an educational app be as engaging as something like TikTok or Instagram or mobile games. But the good news is that – And by the way, the reason I don’t believe that is because ultimately you have to teach people something. And it’s hard to compete with, like, cats and celebrities. But the good news is that I don’t think you have to. See, here’s the thing. When you’re learning something, you get meaning out of it. Whereas when you’re scrolling for two hours on Instagram, a lot of times afterwards, you feel like you just wasted your time. So I think it’s actually OK if your educational product is only 80 to 90 percent as engaging as something like TikTok, because the other 10 or 20 percent will be provided by people’s internal motivation.”

So, who’s right? Are smartphones the proverbial devil? Or are they the gateway to breakthrough learning.

You decide.

Moving on.

What 2024 Will Bring for K-12 Policy: 5 Issues to Watch (EducationWeek)

According to EducationWeek online,

“Educators should expect debates over school choice, teacher pay increases, artificial intelligence, and standardized testing in state legislatures and on Capitol Hill in 2024.”

If that’s true, we might be talking about the wrong things to impact young people’s learning. Maybe issues like learner choice, learning coach recruitment and retainment, supporting individual learning plans for all learners, and alternate evaluations plans might be a better list to take on in 2024.

New Analysis Finds Charter School Sector Still Has Plenty of Room to Grow (The 74)

Michael Petrilli, president of the Fordham Institute and a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, wrote recently in The 74,

“The conventional wisdom in some quarters is that the charter school movement has run its course. Abandoned by an increasingly progressive Democratic Party for being ‘neo-liberal’ and by an increasingly populist Republican Party for being ‘technocratic,’ charter schools (the story goes) are falling into the chasm that has opened up in the political center of our ultra-politicized country.”

“But the conventional wisdom is wrong.”

“Yes, the politics around public charter schools have become more challenging, especially in the blue-hued cities where most of the media lives and works. But across vast expanses of urban and semi-urban America, and especially in Black and brown communities where charter schools have proven most popular and effective, there’s still plenty of room to grow, and few policy barriers standing in the way.”

“That’s one key takeaway from a new analysis by my colleagues David Griffith and Jeanette Luna at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, The Education Competition Index: Quantifying competitive pressure in America’s 125 largest school districts. The median large district in the U.S. still serves upward of 80% of its resident students, with the other kids attending charter schools, private schools or home schools. That means that most large districts, including highly urban ones, are far from being saturated with options – especially for families of color, who generally are poorly served by traditional public schools. This makes them promising locales for further charter expansion.”

Or learning pods. Or microschools. Or a new learning system not yet created.

The beat goes on, and ABPTL will be there throughout 2024.

Have a great weekend. Til Monday. SVB