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> But the smartphone thesis has a few weak spots. It’s not just middle schoolers and high schoolers whose performance is declining; it’s also kids in elementary

> But the smartphone thesis has a few weak spots. It’s not just middle schoolers and high schoolers whose performance is declining; it’s also kids in elementary school. Phone use has certainly increased among young children, but not to the ubiquitous proportions of adolescents. Easy. Parents of young children are on their phones more than ever before. That means less reading and more screen time. One of the single largest determiners of schooling success is the number of books at home. Kids who are exposed to books and reading at home overwhelmingly out-achieve kids who are not. It starts earlier than people think and the effects are longer lived than people think. School standards have almost nothing to do with it.

greygoo222 1y ago
> One of the single largest determiners of schooling success is the number of books at home. This "effect" is the textbook example of correlation != causation. By which I mean, it was literally in my AP Psych textbook in high school.
- bodiekane 1y ago
  Except, programs which give free books to children in households without books demonstrably improve reading. There's a correlation component, but also there absolutely is a causal connection of access to books and parents reading to children.
- devilbunny 1y ago
  But it’s also a big potential confounder, and I certainly don’t know the literature well enough to say how well they managed to account for that - not that education research has a ton of great studies, but they’re unlikely to all be colossal mistakes. Lots of books in the home? Great: you have parents who read for enjoyment, have a stable space for living that has lots of room for books (in the pre-eBook/tablet era, my book collection at college was maybe 1/10 of the books in my parents’ house that were specifically mine, not theirs; just their casual reading filled a wall, and they could afford to install built-in shelves as opposed to moving frequently and having to move both books and shelves), and enough money to buy books. Imagination Library (or similar) can fix the last one, but not the first two.

greygoo222 1y ago

> One of the single largest determiners of schooling success is the number of books at home. This "effect" is the textbook example of correlation != causation. By which I mean, it was literally in my AP Psych textbook in high school.

bodiekane 1y ago
Except, programs which give free books to children in households without books demonstrably improve reading. There's a correlation component, but also there absolutely is a causal connection of access to books and parents reading to children.
devilbunny 1y ago
But it’s also a big potential confounder, and I certainly don’t know the literature well enough to say how well they managed to account for that - not that education research has a ton of great studies, but they’re unlikely to all be colossal mistakes. Lots of books in the home? Great: you have parents who read for enjoyment, have a stable space for living that has lots of room for books (in the pre-eBook/tablet era, my book collection at college was maybe 1/10 of the books in my parents’ house that were specifically mine, not theirs; just their casual reading filled a wall, and they could afford to install built-in shelves as opposed to moving frequently and having to move both books and shelves), and enough money to buy books. Imagination Library (or similar) can fix the last one, but not the first two.