One-minute phone breaks could help keep students more focused in class and better in tests

Phones can be useful tools in classrooms to remind students of deadlines or encourage more exchange between students and teachers. At the same time, they can be distracting. Students report using their phones for non-academic purposes as often as 10 times a day. Thus, in many classrooms, phones are not allowed.

Now, researchers in the US have investigated if letting students use their phones for very brief amounts of time—dubbed phone or technology breaks—can enhance classroom performance and reduce phone use.

“We show that technology breaks may be helpful for reducing cell phone use in the college classroom,” said Prof Ryan Redner, a researcher at Southern Illinois University and first author of the Frontiers in Education study. “To our knowledge, this is the first evaluation of technology breaks in a college classroom.”

The shorter, the better

Throughout a full term, the researchers experimentally evaluated the effectiveness of technology breaks, lasting one, two, or four minutes, respectively. In some of the bi-weekly sessions, the researchers introduced equally long question breaks as a control condition.

During these breaks, students were not allowed to use their phones, but were encouraged to ask questions. Both breaks occurred 15 minutes into the lecture element of class. In the study, phone use was defined as touching the phone.

The results showed that when technology breaks were implemented, students generally used their phones less often than during sessions with question breaks. During technology breaks lasting just one minute, phone use was at its lowest, making them most efficient at reducing the time students spent on their phones during class.

It is not yet fully understood why this might be. “One possibility is that one minute is enough to read and send a smaller number of messages. If they have more time to send many messages, they may be more likely to receive messages and respond again during class,” explained Redner.

In addition, the researchers also found that in class sessions where one-minute breaks were in effect, students’ test performance peaked. Higher average test scores (over 80%) were consistently observed. “Our hope is that it means students were less distracted during lecture, which leads to better performance,” said Redner.

Used to phone use

The researchers said that it is unlikely that students behaved differently knowing their phone use was monitored—an effect called reactivity.

“Typically, reactivity occurs early in a study and its effects are reduced over time. We may see some in early sessions, but I am not convinced that we had much reactivity. At this point, students are probably used to using cell phones in the college classroom, also under the observation of the professor and other students,” Redner explained.

While their results point to the possible effectiveness of short technology breaks, the researchers said their data is hard to explain in its current state. For example, phone use data was highly variable among sessions, and it is not entirely clear why. This makes it more difficult to draw definite conclusions. Further studies are needed, the researchers said, to find the underlying reasons for high variability.

They also said that while phone use decreased in some of their experimental settings, it was not non-existent. “We are trying to find ways to reduce cell phone use and doing so without penalties. We hope our findings inspire researchers and teachers to try approaches to reducing cell phone use that are reinforcement-based,” concluded Redner.