A business journal from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Wharton’s Angela Duckworth shares early findings from a national survey on cell phone use in American public schools.

A team led by Wharton professor and psychologist Angela Duckworth is only a few months into yearlong research on cell phones in public schools, but the preliminary findings are clear: The stricter the policy, the better.

More than 20,000 public school educators nationwide have responded to the Phones in Focus survey since it was launched in April to understand the broad effects of cell phone use on student achievement and well-being. The key finding so far is that school-wide bans that keep phones out of the classroom are linked with fewer distractions.

“What we’re seeing in the 20,000-plus responses is an important pattern, which is the stricter the policy, the happier the teacher. The stricter the policy, the less distraction there is for students in terms of their academic work,” Duckworth said in an interview with This Week in Business.

Duckworth, who is a professor in the Department of Operations, Information and Decisions as well as faculty co-director of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative, is working with Stanford University economists Matt Gentzkow and Hunt Allcott on Phones in Focus. The nonpartisan project is sponsored by the National Governors Association with the ultimate goal of drafting evidence-based policy recommendations to manage cell phone use in schools.

“Not only is school cell phone policy an urgent topic, it may be one of the last bipartisan topics in the universe,” Duckworth said. “We have not found the educator who does not care about this issue and who doesn’t feel we should be doing more than what we’re doing right now.”

Educators at K-12 public schools in the U.S. are invited to take the five-minute, confidential survey. At the end of the survey, participants will get a real-time snapshot of cell phone policies across the country. Visit phonesinfocus.org.

Duckworth said that for years teachers were given the discretion to set their own agenda in the classroom, including whether they allowed cell phones. But that autonomy has led to what scientists call a “collective action trap,” where individual decision-making is outmatched by the scope of the problem.

“What teachers have been saying in our survey data is they need help,” she said. “They can’t just legislate cell phone policy as a teacher on their own, separate from what the school is doing as a whole.”