Etude britannique sur le smartphone à l'école

CEP Discussion Paper No 1350 May 2015 ISSN 2042-2695 Ill Communication: Technology, Distraction & Student Performance Louis-Philippe Beland Richard Murphy Abstract This paper investigates the impact of schools banning mobile phones on student test scores. By surveying schools in four English cities regarding their mobile phone policies and combining it with administrative data, we find that student performance in high stakes exams significantly increases post ban. We use a difference in differences (DID) strategy, exploiting variations in schools’ autonomous decisions to ban these devices, conditioning on a range of student characteristics and prior achievement. Our results indicate that these increases in performance are driven by the lowestachieving students. This suggests that restricting mobile phone use can be a low-cost policy to reduce educational inequalities. Keywords: Mobile phones, technology, student performance, productivity JEL codes: I21; I28; O33; J24 This paper was produced as part of the Centre’s EducationSkills and Programme. The Centre for Economic Performance is financed by the Economic and Social Research Council.