Phone-free schools in the sunflower state: A quasi-experiment assessing outcomes of bell-to-bell personal electronic device policies
In the wake of mounting concerns about the harms of digital technology on children and adolescents, an increasing number of schools, school districts, and states have enacted policies that restrict students’ use and possession of personal electronic devices (PED) for the entire school day. In Kansas, the variation in public middle and high schools’ PED policies due to local control, coupled with the need for more robust and rigorous research, underscored an opportunity to analyze the effects of bell-to-bell PED policies compared to schools without bell-to-bell PED policies. Through a four-phase quasi-experiment that entailed the compilation of PED policy and demographic information for most, if not all, public middle and high schools and school districts in Kansas, coarsened exact matching (CEM) procedures, the creation of a panel dataset, and staggered difference-in-differences analyses, this dissertation study found that most outcomes did not have significant changes following adoption of bell-to-bell PED policies. In terms of benefit, at the middle school level, chronic absenteeism rates for students with disabilities improved. However, two potentially concerning findings emerged, chiefly at the high school level: high schools that implemented bell-to-bell PED policies experienced a significant decline in (1) English Language Arts (ELA) proficiency rates and (2) math proficiency rates on the Kansas Assessment Program (KAP). Given that Kansas has now adopted a statewide bell-to-bell PED policy beginning the 2026-2027 school year, the findings from the dissertation study reflect the possibility that the effects of impending policy change might be inconsequential in improving attendance, chronic absenteeism, standardized test scores, and graduation outcomes, and could lead to worse academic performance. It should nevertheless be cautioned that a multitude of limitations constrained the rigor and robustness, and the reliability and validity, of the dissertation study.
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations