Currently reading Harris & Lanius (2025) on “The Impact of Classroom Architecture and Pedagogical Strategies on University Students’ Disruptive Phone Usage in Calculus”

This is a nice little study! Do students use their phones (in a disruptive way, not to respond to a teacher-posed Menti question or similar) more in certain types of physical spaces, and more in certain instructional settings?

Harris & Lanius (2025) use observations of frequency and duration of phone use in class and find that students use their phones more in large, empty spaces where they are far away from the teacher, and when not working in groups. Both suggest to me that they use their phones more when they feel less social pressure to stay on task. Or, to say it the other way round, when they feel less encouraged to focus on learning. And indeed, recommended strategies are to encourage students to out their phones away, and to make sure they are in close proximity to each other and the teacher (and when it’s not possible to book a smaller room [because room booking is always difficult at universities, and with students not showing up to non compulsory classes, it’s also really difficult to estimate how big a room should ideally be booked], to invite students to only use an appropriately sized portion of the big room).

Harris & Lanius (2025) also look at students’ reported academic confidence, and find that students that are more confident spend more time on their phones. That could either be because they need to focus less, or they could overestimate their abilities because they spend too much time on their phones…

One big caveat for me is that it is really difficult to say whether phone use was constructive or not when the observation is limited to whether students are using their phone, not also considering what they are doing with it. They might be looking up a technical term, for all we know? Or they might be rebooking the dentist appointment right then so they can get that thought off their mind and focus on class again. Or they might be mindlessly scrolling social media, who knows… Also, maybe they all started scrolling when the lecture or group work was really boring, and stopped when they needed to focus again? We don’t know.

But anyway, for me, the conclusion from this study is that we can always encourage students to put phones away to avoid getting distracted, and that we can also try and make the physical space as conductive to learning as possible (more on that here). Having students sit close-ish together seems good in any case, and if it also reduces destructive phone use, even better!

Harris, I., & Lanius, M. (2025). The Impact of Classroom Architecture and Pedagogical Strategies on University Students’ Disruptive Phone Usage in Calculus. Teaching & Learning Inquiry, 13. https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/TLI/article/view/78258/58398

Featured image: The buoy this morning. Did a little PB! :-)