Put the phone in another room

The gist. In two carefully designed experiments with 795 university learners, having a phone visible on the desk, even switched off and untouched, was linked to lower working memory and reasoning scores than having it in another room; a phone tucked in a pocket or bag landed in between and wasn't clearly different from either end.

What the study found

Researchers at the University of Texas and UC San Diego randomly assigned participants to keep their phone on the desk (face down or face up), in their pocket or bag, or in a separate room, then sat two standard cognitive tests: a working memory task and ten reasoning puzzles from Raven's Matrices. Across two separate experiments, 520 learners then 275 more, those with their phone in another room scored higher on both tests than those with a phone on the desk, and the size of that gap held up almost exactly the second time round.

Silencing the phone or switching it off completely made no measurable difference, which rules out incoming notifications as the explanation. Almost all participants said afterwards that their phone's location had "not at all" affected their performance, so this wasn't something anyone noticed happening in the moment.

What it might mean for your classroom

This was lab research with university learners doing short, computer-based tests, not school-age learners doing real classwork, so any classroom use is a reasonable extension worth testing rather than a proven method. The clearest, safest reading is that full separation beats a phone on the desk; a phone tucked in a bag or pocket is a weaker, less certain middle step. That narrowing of available working memory capacity is exactly the kind of thing cognitive load theory would predict from anything competing for attention during a demanding task.

• Move. Before extended writing or a multi-step maths task, ask learners to put phones in bags at the front of the room rather than face down on desks, and say why so it feels like routine, not a surprise search.
• Move. Fold full phone separation into exam-condition set-up for timed past papers and revision sessions, alongside whatever revision techniques the class already uses, rather than treating it as a separate rule.
• Move. Notice which learners say they rely on their phone most: this study found they had the most to lose from its presence, which may connect to wider executive function and self-regulation skills worth building alongside the routine.

Treat it as an experiment, not a recipe: try full separation with one class for two weeks and watch whether learners seem to settle into tasks faster or produce more in the same time, rather than assuming it will work the same way for every subject or every learner.

How solid is this?

Rated Promising. Two well-powered, properly randomised experiments show a consistent pattern, and the effect survived checks meant to rule out simpler explanations like distraction from notifications. But the clean, statistically solid result is specifically "another room beats the desk": a phone in a pocket or bag was never clearly different from either end in either experiment. Both experiments tested university learners in a single lab sitting, not school-age learners across a lesson or a revision period, and a later pooled analysis of 22 studies found the effect was real but small and inconsistent across settings. Treat this as a promising, small-scale nudge worth trying before working-memory-heavy tasks, not a guaranteed fix.

The source

Ward, A. F., Duke, K., Gneezy, A., & Bos, M. W. (2017). Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One's Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2(2), 140-154.

Read the original study