Flaws in a Recent Lancet Study on Phone Use in Schools
- lizaearle
- Feb 20
- 1 min read
Five problems that call into question the authors’ conclusion that phone restrictions don’t improve mental health or academic performance
Feb 13, 2025
In this post, we show why the recent Lancet study’s assertions that restrictive phone policies in schools yield no benefits are unfounded. For example, the phone-policies in the ‘permissive’ vs ‘restrictive’ schools did not differ very much, their measure of academic performance was crude, and their measures of screen time were unreliable.
A recent study published in The Lancet (Goodyear et al., 2025) has generated news headlines suggesting that restricting phone use in schools has no effect on the wellbeing or academic performance of students. This contradicts several previous studies that did find such benefits.
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