Could smart phones be making us dumber?

The Program for International Student Assessment, administered by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, tests 15-year-olds in math, reading, and science. It stands as one of the world’s most famous measures of academic achievement and its scores are definitely trending down. Indeed, the authors of the PISA report bemoaned “an unprecedented drop in performance” globally that was “nearly three-times as large as any prior change.”

 Certainly the pandemic played a role but some experts also blame the ubiquity of smartphones in adolescent life the Atlantic reported. Some researchers, such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, argue that student well-being began a steep decline around 2012, just as smartphones and social media became the beating heart of teen culture. Some have also suggested that smartphone use is so distracting in schools that it has markedly reduced student achievement.

Across the OECD, science scores peaked in 2009, and reading scores in 2012. Since then, developed countries have as a whole performed “increasingly poorly.” “No single country showed an increasingly positive trend in any subject,” PISA reported,  the Atlantic noted.