702, Tuesday night

Connectedness. And we took this measure among learners. And we then checked how strictly schools apply policy, not only in wording, but also how strictly educators at these schools enact policy. And what we found was two things. Number one, if schools enact policies in a real strict way, so they really restrict smartphone use effectively, and

Teachers in that school agree about the rules around smartphones and they are consistent in their application of these rules, then we do see a reduction in smartphone vigilance. So those schools do show that learners spend less time thinking about and using their phones. It's a lot of work for teachers to do this, right? Monitoring and policing smartphone use is a lot of effort, but it can be effective.

If it is done, this is what we found firstly. But, and this is the second thing, and this is really the big finding: is we then checked whether we can explain variance in learners' academic performance. So, a different way to say this is we checked whether smartphone use during school has any impact or is associated with academic performance among learners. And we found that yes, it is, but that

Effect is tiny. So, to put this in statistical terms, we found that we could explain less than 1% of variant in academic performance if we use smartphone vigilance during the school day as our predictor variable. This means that it seems to us that independent of how much time learners spend on their phones at school, the kids that were performing well academically are.

Still, the kids that perform well academically, and those that struggle academically are still the ones that struggle academically. And smartphone use doesn't really play a big role in that. And this is quite surprising because it contradicts this knee-jerk reaction that