“How learning doesn't work” Children evaluate their cell phone use – An empirical pilot study

Abstract

In our increasingly digitally organized society, we enjoy great benefits from easier working conditions
and the acceleration of developmental processes. Children are expected to be prepared for this and to
receive a tablet or cell phone as early as possible. This, however, poses a huge risk because a child’s
brain must initially organize itself in an analog fashion. This means that the spatial-modular building of
neural networks and the rhythmic timing of brain activities mature very slowly through upbringing and
school education to support memory formation and thinking. Once this foundation has been established,
a digital workplace will be easily accessible to any young adult.
To investigate in more detail the impacts of private cell phone use on the learning abilities of children,
we designed a cognitive test that, among other things, measures spatiotemporal abilities and memory
performance. A total of 54 third-grade students (aged 8 and 9) were subjected to the testing at an
elementary school in the Rhein-Neckar-Kreis/Baden Württemberg region from December 2019 to March
2020. The intensity of private cell phone use was measured with a nonverbal method, the evidence-based
water glass method. Prior to testing, we evaluated the children’s ability to evaluate themselves with this
nonverbal method and designed a lie item, which allowed us to filter out those children who were unable
to evaluate themselves. Due to the high data quality, variance analysis was used to analyze the quantified
data statistically.
The results showed that prefrontal cortex skills such as spatial perception, concentration, and anticipation
were significantly poorer in third-graders with heavy cell phone use compared to those with little or no
cell phone use. The heavier the cell phone use, the less well developed was their cognitive memory
performance if it included a time delay. Furthermore, we observed a significant impact of the intensity
of cell phone use on the motivation to go to school. The frequency of sports activities, playing outdoors,
friendships, and homework was not significantly affected by cell phone use. The reason for this could be
that modern schoolchildren only have rather limited control over the timing of these activities. Overall,
the data suggest that other cognitive and emotional-motivational abilities such as spelling and handwriting
are also adversely affected by heavy cell phone use. This could be verified by an investigation with a
larger sample size.
The findings of this pilot study should be a warning: with the digital transformation, our society could
cause severe and also irreversible cognitive damage to the young generation. The discussion shows that
brain research findings from the past half century provide comprehensive evidence for this.