Children who own cellphones tend to have lower reading comprehension scores regardless of what age they were when they first got one or whether or not they take it to school, according to new research from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Researchers analyzed the reading comprehension of culturally and linguistically diverse children in grades 3 and 6 — both with and without their own cellphones — in Antelope Valley-region public schools and Coptic Church schools in Los Angeles.
While trying to answer the question, “Do cellphones interfere with the concentration required to perform well on academic tests?,” they found that simply owning a cellphone correlates with worse reading comprehension.
“We found that there’s no age at which you can give a child a phone that’s better or worse for reading comprehension, so it’s just having a phone at all,” said Patricia Greenfield, lead author and UCLA psychology professor. “That’s true in third grade, and it’s true in sixth grade. [And] the children who brought their phones to school had the same reading scores as children who did not have phones at school that day. So, it’s ownership of a phone, not the immediate presence of one, that correlates with poorer reading comprehension at the elementary school level.”
Among the 106 students across both age groups, 46 percent of third graders reported having their own phones, as did 70 percent of sixth graders. Researchers found no difference in reading comprehension among those who owned phones when their devices were on desks or out of sight.
There was some good news, however. Students from non-English-speaking homes who had their own phone demonstrated significantly better reading comprehension the earlier they started using their phone to text.
Among the students included in the study, 30 percent reported speaking Arabic at home and 28 percent said Spanish was their primary home language.
“If you have a phone and if you’re from a family where English is not spoken at home, it’s better for reading comprehension to start texting earlier rather than later,” according to Greenfield. “In fact, when students from Arabic- or Spanish-speaking homes began to text in second or third grade, by sixth grade they had reading comprehension scores similar to their peers who still did not have phones.”
