Notifications Received in 30 Minutes of Class
Introduction If you are choosing to read this post, you've probably seen the image below depicting all the notifications students received on their phones during one class period. You probably saw it as a retweet of this tweet, or in one of Zvi’s posts. Did you find this data plausible, or did you roll to disbelieve? Did you know that the image dates back to at least 2019? Does that fact make you more or less worried about the truth on the ground as of 2024? Last month, I performed an enhanced replication of this experiment in my high school classes. This was partly because we had a use for it, partly to model scientific thinking, and partly because I was just really curious. Before you scroll past the image, I want to give you a chance to mentally register your predictions. Did my average class match the roughly 1,084 notifications I counted on Ms. Garza's viral image? What does the distribution look like? Is there a notable gender difference? Do honors classes get more or fewer notifications than regular classes? Which apps dominate? Let's find out! Before you rush to compare apples and oranges, keep in mind that I don't know anything about Ms. Garza's class -- not the grade, the size, or the duration of her experiment. That would have made it hard for me to do a true replication, and since I saw some obvious ways to improve on her protocol, I went my own way with it. Procedure We opened class with a discussion about what we were trying to measure and how we were going to measure it for the next 30 minutes. Students were instructed to have their phones on their desks and turned on. For extra amusement, they were invited (but not required) to turn on audible indicators. They were asked to tally each notification received and log it by app. They were instructed to not engage with any received notifications, and to keep their phone use passive during the experiment, which I monitored. While they were not to put their names on their tally sheets, they were aske
Looking back, I was surprised by the (unflattering, in my opinion) degree to which LWers saw this data as strong confirmation of their hypotheses about phones being the source of the ills they see in our schools and our young.
I thought it was much more of a mixed picture despite -- or perhaps because -- the numbers were significantly higher than I, a veteran teacher, had expected: If I had been told the previous summer that "next year, we're giving you a cohort of students with this phone usage profile", I might have braced for a crop of students that came off as especially scatterbrained. But overall, these students -- even most... (read more)