The impact of cellphone use on academic performance- does choosing when to use a cellphone affect academic outcomes?

Abstract

Students are using their cellphone multiple times throughout the day, extending into the classroom. Last year, we conducted a study to evaluate whether the frequency of cellphone use correlated with students’ course grades. We observed that sending out text messages was not predictive of students’ course grades, however the number of text messages a student received within a day was predictive of student's course grades. I aimed to examine this difference on immediate testing performance. Participants watched a 16-minute lecture after which they were tested on the lecture content. Importantly, students were assigned to one of three conditions: No texting condition, where they put their cellphone away, the controlled texting condition, where they decided when to send text messages or the uncontrolled texting condition, where they sent text messages in response to a prompt sent to them by the experimenter. Our analysis revealed that participants who did not use their cellphone performed better on the test than students who use the cell phone. However, there were no differences in test scores between participants in the control texting condition and the uncontrolled texting condition. The absence of these differences in the current study is likely attributable to the differences in memory performance between immediate testing and overall GPA.