After Covid, I banned all screens in my life science classroom at New York University and never looked back. It was, by far, my single most important pedagogical innovation in 10 years of teaching.
The effects were immediate and obvious. Students now routinely come to me after two or three classes and say how amazed they are at their ability to pay attention for an hour. However, I remain an extreme case among my colleagues. To my knowledge, no one in my department has gone as far as to force students to write in (gasp!) paper notebooks, let alone with multiple coloured pens, as I do.
The reason is accessibility. Everyone agrees that screens are a distraction – but, the argument goes, there is no way around it. Some professors point to the expense, financial and environmental, of seeking out real books rather than downloading and printing PDFs – points well taken. Mostly, however, the dialogue revolves around learning disabilities. It is implied that some people simply cannot use pen and paper, so it’s best to allow everyone the option to type instead.
This is where it gets interesting. For example, I have recently had a few requests to use tablets with digital pens. I asked NYU’s disability centre to clarify the rationale behind allowing a digital pen but not a real one. In response, I got robotic lawyer-speak about students being granted accommodations based on their disability. If I refused this accommodation, the disability centre would seek out peer note takers for hire. That is, they would pay another student in the same class to use pen and paper (they did not question my right to ban tech).
I tried to consult some academic literature – I am a neuroscientist, after all. What medical condition allows students to write using a digital pen on a screen but precludes them from writing with a pen on paper? To my surprise, I found what I can only describe as an extremely shoddy body of research. Most studies on the subject date back to the 2010s and even the early 2000s, and most was done on very small samples of middle-school children. A lot is based on qualitative case studies that do not include controls.
Probably the most authoritative paper on the subject is a 2017 analysis, which is usually cited in support of assisted technology for learning disabilities. But if you actually read it, it reveals an incredibly spotty record: “Only two of the survey studies we located used statistical hypothesis testing,” it says… “The studies were often dated, presenting information from a time before major changes in university disability services. Further, the publications did not form a cumulative body of science and did not build on each other: each discussed a separate question, and they did not tend to cite each other.”
More importantly, the very approach to the question seems flawed to me. Studies to determine whether students with dysgraphia benefit from technology assistance usually give them writing tasks, measure how well they write, and then ask them for their opinion. What these studies show is that children who have troubles writing by hand can type more text, make fewer mechanical mistakes and prefer it to writing by hand. What they do not show is that replacing actual pens with digital pens improves long-term learning.
The evidence actually suggests that media assistance in general does little good in the long run. A recent long-term study showed that even for students with reading and writing disabilities, the benefits of assisted technology waned after a year. It appears to help with immediate tasks, but there’s very little evidence of any long-term benefit.
On the other hand, we well know the long-term problems that technology can create. Screen time is strongly associated with myopia, distractibility, sleep disruption and other mental and physical health problems. Banning cell phones in schools clearly improves test scores, especially among the lowest-scoring students – and this information is from a 2016 study, when tech was a lot less pervasive than it is today.
A 2020 study, meanwhile, tried to combat student distraction by reducing their digital multitasking via 11 different strategies. All 11 failed. No matter how much students were primed to focus, they all returned to the same mental habits of spreading their attention across a dozen competing digital distractions.
Even if technology offers genuine benefits for some students with some disabilities, we need a societal mechanism to challenge the necessity of accommodations. I don’t begrudge the mechanisms set up to grant them to students who need them, but we must also have guard rails to deny them to others. We need an equivalent of the Office of Inspector General to oversee, review and sometimes reverse the granting of accommodations – or, if you prefer, an equivalent of peer review. But even raising such a proposition can be treacherous; when I so much as ask for clarification about accommodating students, I am often accused of ableism or lack of empathy.
It’s not that I don’t trust individual students to tell the truth about their mental health. It is that I have a good grasp of how complex systems – such as student bodies and generational groups – behave. If there is an minimum-energy state, the system will eventually gravitate there. It might take some time: if our students have integrity, they might hold on to their principles for a few more years. But unless we set up pressures in the other direction, we will eventually arrive at a situation where all mental and physical activity required for learning is outsourced to machines and humans will become parasites on a planet of thinking technology.
I’m not sure there’s anything we can do about it – but I’m definitely not going to help it happen.
Nikolay Kukushkin is a neuroscientist and clinical associate professor at New York University. His book, One Hand Clapping: The Origin Story of Human Experience, will be published in July.
