> 'peace and quiet' in the classroom is mistaken for educational success.

To clarify, do you think that phones or the removal of phones leads to these outcomes? Do you think that teachers like or dislike phones? Or is the point that there are many biases both ways?

> they have rose-tinted ideas about the way things used to be

Some do. Are teachers the only ones?

> if this was a serious attempt to gauge whether smartphones are [detrimental] or beneficial, we'd have a double-blind, standardised anonymously-graded test.... Funny how no-one seems to be eager to finance such a study.

I am not sure how you would set this up in a way that does not fall victim to a dozen confounding variables. There have been comparisons of standardized tests before and after phone bans, of course, but those also fall victim to similar statistical issues.

School A bans them, school B does not. None of the teachers know a study is being done.

My point is that if you ask wagonmakers what they think about cars, you won't get many positive replies, but enthsiastic ones where city governments decide to go full Amish. New times and new technology necessitate changing the craft, and the methods of yesteryear, though trained into teachers, just don't work anymore. Change is scary.

I didn't claim the participants wouldn't know whether they own a phone - obviously they would. I said they wouldn’t know they’re in a study whose purpose is to correlate smartphone use with academic performance.

That's perfectly compatible with a double-blind setup:

* the *students* just think they’re taking standardized tests, not that the effects of their smartphone habits are being monitored;

* the *graders* don’t know whose tests belong to whom.

That’s about as "double blind" as social-science research gets. The commenter I replied to latched onto the literal impossibility of hiding the phone itself, not the intentional design of the experiment.