The negative effect of smartphone use on academic performance may be overestimated: evidence from a two-year panel study

Abstract

This study monitored 458 university students' smartphone usage over two years to assess the relationship between in-class smartphone use and academic performance. We utilize a novel dataset where screentime was recorded continuously across multiple courses, allowing us to examine the link between students' smartphone use and grade at the individual level and the individual-in-course level. In an initial cross-sectional analysis, we find that students’ average in-class smartphone use is negatively related to their GPA, controlling for high school performance and salient individual characteristics. However, this relationship does not persist in a panel model with individual-in-course level observations where we include fixed effects for both students and classes. We conclude that cross-sectional models likely overestimate the effect of smartphone usage on grades due to unobserved individual and course traits. This suggests that researchers should not interpret even very well-controlled correlations between smartphone usage and academic performance as causal relations.