What Studies Found About Screens and Technology

By Laura Lurns · Reviewed by Philip Weaver · Last reviewed 2026-10-03

What the screens and technology research we hold covers

This page opens one of the ten areas in our research section. It reports what the studies we hold found, as strongly as they found it.

This page covers screens and school results, and phones at school. It also covers computers in class, and learning software that teaches.

Read what a study does not show before you read what it found.

Screens and school results

This part covers three sources on falling US test scores.

The Nation's Report Card (NAEP) shows US reading and math scores have fallen. The agency that runs it says, "NAEP is not designed to identify the causes of performance differences." NAEP has published nothing linking the drop to devices.

The Education Recovery Scorecard puts state test results for grades 3 to 8 on one national scale. It comes from Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth. It finds the drop began around 2013. That was before the pandemic. The Scorecard names two changes from that time. One is schools being held less to account for test scores. The other is more social media use by teenagers. It does not choose between them. Neither do we.

Wyckoff (2025) weighed five possible causes, phones and social media among them. Wyckoff's conclusion: "No single factor explains the pre-pandemic learning loss." No study we hold separates screens from the other causes.

Phones at school

This part covers three studies of school phone rules.

Beland and Murphy (2016) compared schools in England before and after phone bans. Test scores rose a little, mostly among students who were behind. The schools chose their own bans, so the real gain may be smaller. Figlio and Özek (2025) studied one large Florida district after the state's ban. Every school in the district had the ban. They compared schools with more and less phone use before it. So they could not measure the full effect of a ban. Test scores rose a little in the second year. Suspensions rose in the first year, then fell back. In the first year, in-school suspensions for Black students rose by about 30 percent. Everyone in these two phone studies was in middle school or older.

A school ban is not the same as less screen time overall. Goodyear and colleagues (2025) studied students aged 12 to 15 in 30 English schools. They compared schools with strict and loose phone rules. They found no clear difference in English or math scores. That was a survey at one point in time, so it cannot show cause.

Computers in class

This part covers three sources on computers and school.

One trial assigned college classrooms at random (Carter, Greenberg and Walker, 2017). Some classrooms allowed laptops and tablets, and some did not. Students in the classrooms that allowed them scored lower on the final exam. The trial was one economics course at a US military academy. It cannot tell distraction from note-taking, and it says nothing about school-age children.

An OECD report compared countries' 2012 test results (OECD, 2015). Countries that spent heavily on school computers showed no clear gain in reading, math or science. That is a finding of no benefit. It is not a finding of harm.

One trial in 319 rural schools in Peru picked at random which schools got laptops (Cristia and colleagues, 2012). The children tested were in second, fourth and sixth grade. Math and language scores were not clearly higher in the schools that got them.

Learning software that teaches

This part covers tutoring software and two ways of practicing.

VanLehn (2011) reviewed controlled studies of tutoring software. Some software responded to each step of a student's work. It did nearly as well as a human tutor. Software that checked only the final answer did much less well.

A second review looked at 50 controlled studies of tutoring software (Kulik and Fletcher, 2016). Gains were much larger on tests built to match the program than on standard tests.

In our view, even good software adds to teaching. It does not replace a teaching adult.

In one study, students read passages of text (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006). Some read them again. Others took recall tests with no answers given. On a test five minutes later, rereading looked better. Two days and one week later, the tested students remembered more.

One review pooled 317 experiments on recalling words and other verbal material (Cepeda and colleagues, 2006). What was practiced in spread-out sessions was remembered longer than the same practice done all at once.

What the screens and technology research we hold does not show

This part covers the limits of the studies on this page.

No study of any Learning Success program exists.

No study we hold shows that screens caused the drop in US test scores. NAEP, which measured the drop, says it is not designed to find causes.

For children under about 10, we hold no research on screens for fun and school results.

We hold no review that pools studies of school phone bans.

We do not lead with studies that count screen hours. That does not mean those studies are wrong.

Our rule is that no page says how your child will change by a given week or month.

Does Learning Success build on this?

No. We do not build our programs on the studies on this page. Most of these studies are about screens and software at school. Everything in our programs is done at home.

Some of our programs are followed on video. Screen-free options are available for families who want them.

In no case do we claim a study's result for our program.

No study of any Learning Success program exists.

Questions we plan to answer on later pages

Later pages in this area are planned. None of them is written yet.

• What has been measured about screens and school results?
• What do school phone bans do?
• What does learning technology teach when it works?
• Why are some apps hard to put down?
• What happens when people cut back on social media?
• Which studies about screens are often misread?

The studies

• National Center for Education Statistics and National Assessment Governing Board (2023). NAEP Long-Term Trend Assessment Results: Reading and Mathematics.
• National Assessment Governing Board (2025). Main NAEP 2024 news release.
• Harvard Center for Education Policy Research, with Stanford's Educational Opportunity Project and Dartmouth (2026). Education Recovery Scorecard.
• Wyckoff (2025). Puzzling Over Declining Academic Achievement. EdWorkingPapers Policy and Practice Series AI25-1197.
• Beland and Murphy (2016). Ill Communication: Technology, Distraction & Student Performance. DOI 10.1016/j.labeco.2016.04.004.
• Figlio and Özek (2025). The Impact of Cellphone Bans in Schools on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Florida. NBER Working Paper 34388 / EdWorkingPaper 25-1315.
• Goodyear, Randhawa, Adab and colleagues (2025). School phone policies and their association with mental wellbeing, phone use, and social media use (SMART Schools). The Lancet Regional Health – Europe 101211. DOI 10.1016/j.lanepe.2025.101211.
• Carter, Greenberg and Walker (2017). The impact of computer usage on academic performance: Evidence from a randomized trial at the United States Military Academy. Economics of Education Review 56:118–132.
• OECD (2015). Students, Computers and Learning: Making the Connection. PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris. DOI 10.1787/9789264239555-en.
• Cristia, Ibarrarán, Cueto, Santiago and Severín (2012). Technology and Child Development: Evidence from the One Laptop per Child Program. IDB Working Paper IDB-WP-304.
• VanLehn (2011). The Relative Effectiveness of Human Tutoring, Intelligent Tutoring Systems, and Other Tutoring Systems. Educational Psychologist 46(4):197–221. DOI 10.1080/00461520.2011.611369.
• Kulik and Fletcher (2016). Effectiveness of Intelligent Tutoring Systems: A Meta-Analytic Review. Review of Educational Research 86(1):42–78. DOI 10.3102/0034654315581420.
• Roediger and Karpicke (2006). Test-Enhanced Learning: Taking Memory Tests Improves Long-Term Retention. Psychological Science 17(3):249–255. DOI 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x.
• Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted and Rohrer (2006). Distributed Practice in Verbal Recall Tasks: A Review and Quantitative Synthesis. Psychological Bulletin 132(3):354–380.