Can one-minute phone breaks actually help students concentrate?

Scientists are calling on teachers to lay down their arms and embrace the fact that phone breaks could help students stay focused.

Phones in lockers all day? A trip to the principal's office or a call to the parents? Phone collection? Detention? Teachers are sharing various strategies on Reddit to tackle students using mobile phones during class.

In general, educators are faced with a broad dilemma – to ban technology or embrace it. In high school, teachers still have the authority to manage it, but once you get to college, it spirals completely out of control. Students report using their phones for non-academic purposes as often as ten times a day, while phones are not allowed in many classes.

Substantial research reveals that mobile phones affect the attention span of their users. To go even further, Paderborn University in Germany found that the mere presence of a smartphone results in lower cognitive performance.

A double-edged sword

But not all is lost. A study by Prof. Perry Samson at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor showed that an interactive tool designed to be used during larger classes dramatically influenced student participation and engagement, with over 90% of students attending lectures voluntarily.

Responding to classroom activities such as content questions using cell phones, tablets, computers, and clickers can enhance the learning process.

Researchers at Trinity College in Ireland also performed an experiment in which students in class sent an SMS in real-time via their mobile devices.

The lecturer can verbally develop an interactive loop with students during class by reviewing the flow of messages, just like in the live streaming platform. The results showed that in this setting, a greater proportion of college students ask questions.

Phone breaks can actually be useful

In the latest research, published on October 2nd, researchers at Southern Illinois University reached even more radical conclusions that might shed a different light on using phones during classes.

“We show that technology breaks may help reduce cell phone use in the college classroom,” said Prof Ryan Redner, a researcher at Southern Illinois University.

“To our knowledge, this is the first evaluation of technology breaks in a college classroom.”

The researchers conducted an experiment throughout the term, allowing college students to use their phones, but only for brief periods, called “phone breaks.” Such breaks lasted one, two, or four minutes.

As a control condition in the experiment, the researchers introduced equally long question 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.

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

This puzzled the researchers. “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.

The researchers also found that in classes with one-minute phone breaks, students’ test performance peaked at over 80%.

Too early to draw conclusions

So, is that the bottom line for the phone usage dilemma? Not quite. While the findings from researchers at Southern Illinois suggest that short technology breaks could be effective, they caution that the current data is difficult to interpret. It's too soon to draw definitive conclusions, as more research is needed.

“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.