Absolutely. A few commenters have mentioned school devices (laptops, tablets), and I completely agree this might have something to do with it. Whether kids are using these at school or at home, the potential for distraction is huge. My kids' school laptops have YouTube on them! It's terrible.
As an English teacher, I can’t speak to changes in math instruction (but I might posit a change in focus from computation to conceptual understanding that standard tests muddy?) but the biggest change in curriculum in reading and English was two-fold and probably impacted test scores. The first was a move away from phonics in the early 2000’s (see the Lucy Culkin's discourse) and for older students there was the move away from novel study to a focus on excerpts and articles. There are decided and long range implications that I have seen over my 28 year career as a result.
With regard to the aftershocks, I would argue the pressure for extreme grade inflation from the families and also the ed system more broadly have had the most deleterious effect on learning since the pandemic. There was tremendous pressure to never fail a kid, to offer them grace because of their mental health. As a result, the loosening of academic standards was inevitable.
This is not to say that smartphones don’t have an impact. But I think the impact is to encourage superficial sound bite reading more than anything else.
As a parent of three boys -- 23, 20, 16 -- in California, I can definitely attest to the change in curriculum for my youngest now in public high school. He previously attended a private Catholic high school for 9th grade, and I didn't see the issues in his English class the way I see them in his public school Honors 10th grade English class. Our local public school district also passed a rule this year that allows students to turn in work up to 10 days past its due date. It's a horrendous policy, not only for students but certainly for teachers as well.
Again, Dr. Twenge fails to acknowledge a crucial trend far more associated with increased student depression, sleeplessness, and poor school performance.
That trend, the iceberg tip of the mammoth adult drug crisis, was hastily dismissed as probably not affecting parents and too “small” to affect teenagers. Those dismissals were demolished when the CDC’s 2023 YRBS revealed a shocking 30% of teenagers reporting drug/alcohol abuse among parents/caretakers, 35% histories of violent abuses, 41% “severe” parent/caretaker depression, mental troubles, and suicidality, and 62% emotional abuse.
These staggering numbers have been all but ignored in the teen mental health furor. While trends in violent and emotional abuse remain poorly measured, clear evidence does show parent/adult drug abuse rose sharply during 2010-2022 as teenagers reported more depression.
Standard regression associates parents’ drug/alcohol abuse with far more teenage depression, sleeplessness, poor school grades, and other risks than social media use. Add other adult abuses and troubles, and social media use disappears as a factor in teen mental health.
In 2023, the CDC found teens from homes with drug/alcohol-abusing adults are 1.8 times more likely to get school grades of D or F, while teens who use social media heavily (daily or more) are no more likely to get poor grades than teens rarely on social media (weekly or less). That 85% of depressed teens come from troubled homes, and abused teens use social media more, means we have to untangle those effects on their mental health before we can delineate smaller (if any) social media issues.
I really enjoy reading your work and some other factors that you cited in Generations that seem to have some connection to test score decline appear to be: 1). Decrease in time spent time with homework. 2). Increase in adolescents reporting loneliness 3). Increase in mental health conditions- particularly anxiety. All three of these appear to be connected to the increase in social media and tablet consumption as well. Thank you for publishing this- this is a topic that's not talked about enough.
Thanks for the great work here. One thing we noticed as parents, was that the school our kid goes to, kept to heavy Chromebook usage time once the pandemic was over, in some cases with hours on the school mandated device. Kids began to dread them. It seemed we moved from pandemic zoom meetings chrome book assignments and quizzes in the classroom. To their credit our school changed this, but most kids from what we can gather in other schools are doing what would have been done pre-pandemic with pen and paper, on device. This includes reading and writing. Once schools got used to assigning on a screen they did not want to go back it would seem. So add to this the phone distraction and you have even more time staring at a screen. We saw first hand how hard it was for the teachers to compete with the devices, and how distracting they were. The cost seemed to be at the expense of reading and writing primarily. Could this have something to do with it? Thx
Looking back at my teaching career (2005-2024) in a suburban middle school, I think my school did a good job of enforcing phones in lockers from the start to the end of the school day. But phone use after school still caused lots of social and academic problems in the 2010s. Kids being teased, kids feeling left out, kids struggling to turn in assignments because they were spending so much time on social media rather than doing homework. One response to the stress and anxiety from parents and therapists was to tell students not to sweat tests, including standardized tests. Despite the best efforts of teachers to prepare students for state testing, we started to see more students finishing their testing sessions quickly without much interest in reviewing their work. The cancellation of state testing during Covid in 2020 only reinforced the message that testing was not hugely important. And the NAEP testing discussed in this post is certainly not regarded as "the most well-respected measure" among 8th graders, many of whom feel unlucky to have been chosen for this test and are just eager to get through it. I generally agree with the idea that more students are struggling with reading and math skills and their deficits have been masked by the effects of grade inflation. But how do we control for changes in test-taking attitudes as well?
Absolutely. A few commenters have mentioned school devices (laptops, tablets), and I completely agree this might have something to do with it. Whether kids are using these at school or at home, the potential for distraction is huge. My kids' school laptops have YouTube on them! It's terrible.
As an English teacher, I can’t speak to changes in math instruction (but I might posit a change in focus from computation to conceptual understanding that standard tests muddy?) but the biggest change in curriculum in reading and English was two-fold and probably impacted test scores. The first was a move away from phonics in the early 2000’s (see the Lucy Culkin's discourse) and for older students there was the move away from novel study to a focus on excerpts and articles. There are decided and long range implications that I have seen over my 28 year career as a result.
With regard to the aftershocks, I would argue the pressure for extreme grade inflation from the families and also the ed system more broadly have had the most deleterious effect on learning since the pandemic. There was tremendous pressure to never fail a kid, to offer them grace because of their mental health. As a result, the loosening of academic standards was inevitable.
This is not to say that smartphones don’t have an impact. But I think the impact is to encourage superficial sound bite reading more than anything else.
As a parent of three boys -- 23, 20, 16 -- in California, I can definitely attest to the change in curriculum for my youngest now in public high school. He previously attended a private Catholic high school for 9th grade, and I didn't see the issues in his English class the way I see them in his public school Honors 10th grade English class. Our local public school district also passed a rule this year that allows students to turn in work up to 10 days past its due date. It's a horrendous policy, not only for students but certainly for teachers as well.
Again, Dr. Twenge fails to acknowledge a crucial trend far more associated with increased student depression, sleeplessness, and poor school performance.
From the early 2010s to the 2020s, in the 25-64 age group comprising parents, parents’ partners, relatives, and other adults influencing teenagers, drug/alcohol overdose deaths (https://wonder.cdc.gov/mcd.html) surged from 55,000 to 134,000 and drug/alcohol hospital ER cases (https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/reports/rpt53161/dawn-national-estimates-2023.pdf) exploded from 2.8 million to 5.1 million.
That trend, the iceberg tip of the mammoth adult drug crisis, was hastily dismissed as probably not affecting parents and too “small” to affect teenagers. Those dismissals were demolished when the CDC’s 2023 YRBS revealed a shocking 30% of teenagers reporting drug/alcohol abuse among parents/caretakers, 35% histories of violent abuses, 41% “severe” parent/caretaker depression, mental troubles, and suicidality, and 62% emotional abuse.
These staggering numbers have been all but ignored in the teen mental health furor. While trends in violent and emotional abuse remain poorly measured, clear evidence does show parent/adult drug abuse rose sharply during 2010-2022 as teenagers reported more depression.
Standard regression associates parents’ drug/alcohol abuse with far more teenage depression, sleeplessness, poor school grades, and other risks than social media use. Add other adult abuses and troubles, and social media use disappears as a factor in teen mental health.
In 2023, the CDC found teens from homes with drug/alcohol-abusing adults are 1.8 times more likely to get school grades of D or F, while teens who use social media heavily (daily or more) are no more likely to get poor grades than teens rarely on social media (weekly or less). That 85% of depressed teens come from troubled homes, and abused teens use social media more, means we have to untangle those effects on their mental health before we can delineate smaller (if any) social media issues.
I really enjoy reading your work and some other factors that you cited in Generations that seem to have some connection to test score decline appear to be: 1). Decrease in time spent time with homework. 2). Increase in adolescents reporting loneliness 3). Increase in mental health conditions- particularly anxiety. All three of these appear to be connected to the increase in social media and tablet consumption as well. Thank you for publishing this- this is a topic that's not talked about enough.
Thanks for the great work here. One thing we noticed as parents, was that the school our kid goes to, kept to heavy Chromebook usage time once the pandemic was over, in some cases with hours on the school mandated device. Kids began to dread them. It seemed we moved from pandemic zoom meetings chrome book assignments and quizzes in the classroom. To their credit our school changed this, but most kids from what we can gather in other schools are doing what would have been done pre-pandemic with pen and paper, on device. This includes reading and writing. Once schools got used to assigning on a screen they did not want to go back it would seem. So add to this the phone distraction and you have even more time staring at a screen. We saw first hand how hard it was for the teachers to compete with the devices, and how distracting they were. The cost seemed to be at the expense of reading and writing primarily. Could this have something to do with it? Thx
Looking back at my teaching career (2005-2024) in a suburban middle school, I think my school did a good job of enforcing phones in lockers from the start to the end of the school day. But phone use after school still caused lots of social and academic problems in the 2010s. Kids being teased, kids feeling left out, kids struggling to turn in assignments because they were spending so much time on social media rather than doing homework. One response to the stress and anxiety from parents and therapists was to tell students not to sweat tests, including standardized tests. Despite the best efforts of teachers to prepare students for state testing, we started to see more students finishing their testing sessions quickly without much interest in reviewing their work. The cancellation of state testing during Covid in 2020 only reinforced the message that testing was not hugely important. And the NAEP testing discussed in this post is certainly not regarded as "the most well-respected measure" among 8th graders, many of whom feel unlucky to have been chosen for this test and are just eager to get through it. I generally agree with the idea that more students are struggling with reading and math skills and their deficits have been masked by the effects of grade inflation. But how do we control for changes in test-taking attitudes as well?
See: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-edtech-revolution-has-failed