To be that guy as usual, here's the original open-access article (MDPI, ew) instead of the "university sucks itself off for its research"-style press release.
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“We found that there’s no age at which you can give a child a phone that’s better or worse for reading comprehension, so it’s just having a phone at all,” said lead author and UCLA psychology professor Patricia Greenfield. “That’s true in third grade, and it’s true in sixth grade.”
This seems overly broad to claim based on an observational study. Or rather, they did an experiment, but what they tested in their experiment is different than what they're claiming here. The groups weren't 'kids who aren't allowed to have a phone' and 'kids who are allowed to have a phone', it was 'kids that had their phone with them at school that day' and 'kids who didn't have their phone with them at school that day', and they further broke it up by taking some of the kids with phones and taking their phone away from them for the duration of the experiment.
That is not what your press release is selling me, UCLA!
Compared to... Kids that read books? Sure ok, thatseems obvious.
This isn't news worthy. It tells us nothing at the end of the day. Correlation ≠ causation. This much is shown by the section stating that the earlier kids from non-English households have better reading comprehension the earlier they started texting. Which is basically "sky is blue."
What this is, however, is a good starting point for further research. Why does this correlation exist? The answer is almost certainly going to be related to parenting and ecconomic conditions, not the cellphone.
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Children of Divorce, and separation are (1) more likely to own a cell phone and (2) more likely to be delayed.
What exactly is this saying if they haven't controlled for anything?
I’m guilty of using my phone to play audiobooks so I can do two things at once. Versus pre-phone when I read printed books. There is something to reading printed words vs being read to.
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Later on this translates into poor voting skills. Go figure.
Tech billionaires aggressively push phones, social media, and AI on kids but do the opposite with their kids. This should be sufficient evidence to not allow their targeting of kids.
Actual techbros keep their own kids away from screens.
Idk, my bff Jill
Just need to ban viewing image and video posts.
I did that on piefed and it's amazing how much better it is.
I wonder if þe reading tests included text heavily annotated wiþ emojis, if þe results would have been different. Maybe cell phone kids are just learning a different written language.
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