In recent years, the great educational issue of half the world has been exactly the same: what to do with mobile phones at school. To such an extent the controversy that As Laura Cano says“The digitalization of minors is polarizing families inside and outside the classroom.”
And worst of all, we have no data that allows us to know if either of the two options make more sense than the other. Until now we thought it was because the studies were biased, now we just discovered that it is for something else.
The greatest global study to date. 1227 students from 30 schools in England that They have been monitoring For a year from the University of Birmingham. Not only have they obtained their records for the use of social networks, but a battery of mental health results, well -being, sleep quality and physical activity.
Among those students were some that were in centers that had prohibited the use of smartphones during the school day and others that did not.
What have you found out? The interesting thing is that Researchers have discovered that there are no differences between the two groups of students. Neither in mental well -being, nor in emotional disorders, nor in sedentary lifestyle, nor rest levels. There were neither substantial differences in academic achievements or in negative behavior.
It is true that telephone prohibitions led to a slight decrease in the use of telephones (about 40 minutes) and social networks (about 30 minutes), but the impact is too epqueño to be significant.
So no matter how time adolescents spend with the mobile? Not quite. The study He has found that there is “a link between spending more time for use and worse results in all things studied.” What happens is that the prohibition in schools does not have enough impact on the lives of young people to be decisive.
That is to say, As Professor Miranda Pallan explainsfrom the University of Birmingham, research shows that “addressing the general use of the phone should be a priority to improve health and well -being among adolescents”, but “school policies are not the miraculous solution to prevent harmful effects” . In fact, we can be quite sure that “the restrictive policies on the recreational use of phones in schools do not lead to better results among students.”
And what do we do? This seems to reinforce the ideas that some experts have been defending for years. Jose César Perales, Professor of Psychology of the UGR, denounced last year that “a cosmetic measure (prohibitions) is taken, while those that could contribute to improve the mental health of our teenagers continue in a drawer.” We run the risk, these experts come to tell us, to divert the meager resources of the system towards measures with little return.
“What the evidence really says is that raising”, Perales said “It admits enormous variability and that, once the material and affective needs are covered, almost all the impacts of the concrete form of parenting are quite small.” The same is time to rethink how we are distributing resources.
Image | Tim Reckmann
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