How do students feel about phone bans? UW survey first to offer insight on policies
'I was like thank the Lord,' the Gig Harbor High School English teacher, told Gig Harbor Now and the Kitsap Sun last year. 'Finally I don't have to fight this battle on my own.'
Unsurprisingly, teachers have had by far the most positive reaction to these policies, reporting less stress, better ability to manage their classrooms and perceived social benefits for their students, according to new research out of the University of Washington.
The unpublished study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, offers the first systematic look at how teachers, parents and students in Washington are feeling about these policies.
Districts moved to curtail phone use in recent years, after reporting unprecedented levels of disruptive behaviors and worsening mental health among students following their return from the pandemic closures. Following Peninsula's lead, all schools in Kitsap County have put some restrictions in place over the last year, as have others statewide.
UW researchers surveyed over 5,000 students, 220 teachers and 480 parents across six districts, including Peninsula, said lead author and assistant psychology professor Lucía Magis-Weinberg, who studies how adolescence has been altered in the digital era.
Students were less enthusiastic about the bans, with the vast majority saying they did not perceive an impact. According to Magis-Weinberg, 70% of students said the policies had 'no-impact' on their ability to pay attention, opposed to 20% who said it had a positive impact. A majority also said it had no impact on their well-being.
'That was very surprising to me,' Magis-Weinberg said of the findings. 'I would have expected them to be against the policies and to be quite negative about them.'
How effective these bans are at achieving their prescribed goals, and what type of restrictions are most effective, remain open questions.
There is no question that phones can be a big source of distraction, so when implemented well these bans can encourage better habits, Magis-Weinberg said. At the same time, they need to be tailored to the needs of each district and ideally created with the input from students and staff.
Both students and teachers prefer consistency in application of these restrictions, with top-down rules provided by administrations that are aligned between teachers and classrooms. When decisions about phones are left up to the teacher 'no one likes that,' Magis-Weinberg said. It tends to pit teachers against each other.
Removing phones in isolation was not enough to promote social interaction, researchers found. Schools still need to introduce alternative ways for students to connect, through activities or games.
Bans also did not appear to produce huge improvements in academics or mental health outcomes, but Magis-Weinberg said they seem to have introduced incremental improvements, particularly for teachers.
These policies allowed teachers to shift from 'referee to coach,' she said. They can now encourage better digital habits rather than having to take punitive actions against students.
'Anything that helps teachers be less stressed, feel more effective and changes the relationship from policing to actually having time to teach and connect with students, I think that's important," she said.
Middle school teachers also reported that students seemed more relaxed and had returned to more 'goofy' and 'playful' behavior. Students had become so concerned with how they were perceived, teachers reported, with fears that someone could record or take a picture of them changing how they behaved.
'Even if a school is not implementing a ban,' she said, 'I think it's a clear takeaway that (schools) should really be very very strict about recording.'
This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Student opinions on phone bans in school part of new Washington study
Solve the daily Crossword
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNBC
5 hours ago
- CNBC
The 10 U.S. colleges where students study the hardest—No. 1 isn't Harvard or MIT
Pursuing a STEM degree — which stands for science, technology, engineering or mathematics— has historically paid off well for college students. But earning that credential may require a lot of study time. Many of the 10 colleges where students spend the most time studying have STEM-focused curriculums, according to The Princeton Review's most recent rankings. The publication surveyed students at nearly 400 U.S. colleges and asked how many hours they spend studying outside of class. Students at California Institute of Technology reported the most study time, followed by Harvey Mudd college. All Caltech students — including English and history majors — complete a STEM-focused core curriculum, according to the school's website. And notably, the curriculum is "extraordinarily" hard, the college says. Harvey Mudd exclusively offers Bachelor of Science degrees in a variety of STEM fields to its are the 10 most studious colleges, per Princeton Review's rankings, along with tuition costs for the 2025-26 school year, according to each school's website. Median earnings reflect the median incomes of students who started at each school and received federal aid 10 years ago, according to Department of Education data. No. 1-ranked Caltech prides itself on its world-renowned science and technology research. Students there "work together to solve the problems of tomorrow, while enjoying great weather," a survey respondent wrote for The Princeton Review. Caltech alumni include astronaut Frank Borman, who commanded the first team of astronauts to circle the moon, and Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, as well as 17 Nobel Laureates, the school reports. The school was also named the seventh-best university in the world in 2025 by Times Higher Education, which ranks global institutions on their faculty reputations and research contributions. Though some of the most-studious colleges have rigorous non-STEM programs, STEM majors at any given school tend to spend more time studying than their peers in other majors. First-year undergraduate students in STEM majors spend an average of 17.1 hours a week preparing for class, compared with 15.6 hours a week on average among humanities, communications and social science majors, according to the 2024 National Survey of Student Engagement. The survey — which polled nearly 476,000 students at 771 institutions — found first-year students across disciplines spend an average of 15.8 hours a week on work outside of class.
National Geographic
7 hours ago
- National Geographic
The deepest-diving whales could inspire new treatments for stroke and cancer
Goose-beaked whales hold the record for the deepest dive of any mammal. Researchers want to learn their secrets to develop new drugs for human diseases. Goose-beaked whales (Ziphius cavirostris) hold the record for deepest dive of any marine mammal, and researchers hope that examining how these animals manage their oxygen thousands of feet underwater could one day yield medications that help humans. Photograph By Vincent Legrand/AGAMI Photo Agency/Alamy Whale sightings are never guaranteed, and goose-beaked whales are particularly hard to spot because they spend 90 percent of their time submerged. So when Jillian Wisse and her team position their boat in the right spot and the whales surface, it's a feat. During their field expeditions off the North Carolina coast, sometimes they can even cruise close enough to take tissue samples and appreciate the rake-like scratches that the animals acquire from mating behaviors, social play, and dominance displays. 'They look like the English bulldogs of the whale world. I love seeing them,' says Wisse, a behavioral physiologist at Duke University. Formerly known as Cuvier's beaked whales, goose-beaked whales dive deeper than any other known mammal and are found in most of the world's oceans. The elusive animals regularly dive down to around 3,300 feet and hunt for 20 to 40 minutes straight. Their deepest dive on record is 9,816 feet, and the longest known dive lasted 222 minutes. For comparison, blue whales only reach around 1,640 feet with dive durations around 10 to 20 minutes, and the best human divers tap out at records of 831 feet and 25 minutes. To achieve such impressive dives, goose-beaked whales' bodies have adapted to survive levels of hypoxia or oxygen deprivation that could easily kill a human. Wisse's expeditions are part of a Duke project that aims to understand these deep ocean adaptations in cetaceans, the group that includes whales and bottlenose dolphins. Hypoxia plays a role in health conditions from stroke to cancer, and the researchers' ultimate goal is to apply the findings from the marine mammals to develop treatments that could one day help humans, too. (These divers have evolved an ability to use oxygen more efficiently.) The Duke project is one of many research efforts worldwide that uses whales as models for understanding human diseases. Most of what we know about how deep diving animals handle low oxygen comes from beached whales and seals, which spend more time at the surface and are smaller and easier to study. But the Duke team focuses on getting samples from living whales and dolphins, especially extreme divers like goose-beaked whales, to figure out what's happening in their cells that allows them to survive low oxygen environments. First, the researchers need to get their hands on whale tissues. 'It's hard to get data from whales—they are very hard to get close to,' notes Nicola Quick, a marine scientist and one of the project's leaders. Skin is the most accessible tissue in live whales, though they are not fully representative of what happens inside their bodies, says Wisse who also leads the Duke University's project. From live whales, scientists use a dart to punch out a piece of skin from the thick blubber or fat layer. 'Imagine you took a number two pencil, pulled the eraser out, poked yourself, and pulled it away. That's essentially what's happening,' Wisse explains. Skin cells are multiplied in the lab, exposed to very low oxygen levels like what whales experience during deep dives, and studied. With stranded or beached animals, sampling gets a little bit easier—tissues from skin as well as heart, lung, muscle, and even the brain are simply cut off and brought to the lab. The project is ongoing, but they already have some early results from skin samples of live and stranded goose-beaked whales from the Western North Atlantic. Even under low oxygen conditions, whale skin cells seem to consume oxygen at high levels, while skin cells of dolphins, cows, and humans reduced their oxygen consumption when oxygen was limited. Compared to humans, goose-beaked whales also carry differences in genes that regulate how mitochondria, the power plants of the cell, produce energy. What all this means is that whales have genetically-encoded adaptations that enable them to continue producing energy even when oxygen is extremely limited, while humans—and probably, other land-dwelling mammals lack these adaptations. These findings about the cellular adaptations in whales build on what researchers previously knew about the physiological adaptations whales have for oxygen consumption during deep dives, Wisse says. More blood and slower metabolism Studies of seals and dead whales have already revealed changes in how the animals' bodies function. Seals have about twice the blood volume of humans, carrying much more hemoglobin than we do, says Lars Folklow, an animal physiologist at the Arctic University of Norway. 'They would be caught in any blood doping test in the Olympics, for example,' chuckles Folklow, who researches hypoxia protection mechanisms in diving species. (How do diving seals know how long to hold their breath?) More blood volume means that the animals also have more hemoglobin, the protein that binds to oxygen in the blood and transports it to other organs. That means seals and other diving mammals have a very high capacity to store oxygen. They can surface with a blood oxygen content that is so low that we would lose consciousness if it was us, says Folklow. Estimates from beached sperm whales suggest that blood accounts for 20 percent of their body weight, compared to only seven to eight percent in humans. Whales also have high amounts of myoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in muscles, which helps them sustain at great depths for long durations. Previous research has also shown that whales can dramatically slow down their metabolism when they dive for extended periods of time. Their normal heart rate of 30 to 40 beats per minute at the surface plummets to less than 10 beats per minute during deep dives. The heart rate drop reduces the amount of blood flow and oxygen to non-critical areas like the digestive system, kidneys, and muscles. 'There is no need to run the kidneys at full speed or digest your latest meal while you are diving,' Folklow explains. Instead, the animals selectively perfuse more blood and oxygen to critical organs like the brain. These MRI images show damage (upper and center left in each image) in the brain of a 54-year-old woman after a stroke. Stroke is one of many human health conditions where oxygen deprivation plays a role. Photograph By ZEPHYR / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Zooming in on the brain Brains are exceptionally vulnerable to oxygen deficits in mammals, and Wisse's group is working on getting brain samples from stranded goose-beaked whales to understand how neurons in their brains function when oxygen gets depleted. Folklow's team has examined this question in seals and minke whales by looking at neuroglobin, a brain protein that like hemoglobin and myoglobin transports oxygen. Using brain tissues from dead animals, Folklow's group measured how active the genes that make neuroglobin protein are, and found that gene activity in whales was four to 15 times higher than in cattle, a non-diving mammal relative. The gene activity in seals wasn't quite as high, however, which surprised the research team. Folklow says this could be due to divergent evolution in whales and seals, a phenomenon where two related species independently develop different strategies to combat the same environmental challenge. Besides binding with oxygen, neuroglobin also prevents oxidative stress, which can damage cells. Either of these neuroglobin functions could be helping whales, says Folklow, and it's difficult to narrow down to one of them without running experiments with live brain tissues, the kind of sample that is near-impossible to access. (Whales could one day be heard in court—and in their own words.) What this means for human medicine Despite the experimental challenges, marine mammal researchers hope that their work on hypoxia could help humans overcome health conditions where oxygen is a factor, like stroke, prolonged anesthesia, COVID-19, and cancer. 'One thing we're interested to know is how marine mammals deal with inflammation when diving to such extreme depths,' says Jason Somarelli, a medical oncologist at Duke University and one of the leaders of the whale project. In humans, low-oxygen states are usually tied to inflammation, ultimately leading to tissue damage or death. But deep diving mammals have evolved sophisticated ways to carefully control and manage inflammatory responses, including carrying natural anti-inflammatory substances in their blood. Scientists are still working to fully understand how exactly these protective mechanisms work, but Somarelli suspects that marine mammals must have uncoupled their oxygen sensing response from inflammatory response. If this is true, figuring out how the animals achieve this feat could help identify molecules that a medicine can lock on to and uncouple these signals in humans, says Somarelli. For now, drugs inspired by whale biology are only hypothetical. But hypoxia researchers aren't the only ones interested. Other labs are studying bowhead whales' resilience to age-related diseases like cancer and exceptional longevity. Their super-efficient DNA repair systems could potentially be used to develop treatments for human diseases. Scientists are also studying dementia-like brain changes in toothed whales to better understand Alzheimer's disease. Meanwhile, Wisse continues to snag skin biopsies in hopes of further probing the cellular pathways that help whale cells deal with hypoxia. Finding goose-beaked whales is still like searching for a needle in a haystack for her. When a whale surfaces for a minute and a half, she accelerates her boat to get parallel to the animal and darts to remove a pencil eraser-sized piece of blubber layer that bounces off and floats. The whale then swims away. 'But my favorite moment is when they kind of turn and look back at me straight into my eye,' Wisse says. 'They know what's going on.'
National Geographic
7 hours ago
- National Geographic
Goodbye hard drives, hello DNA: How the double helix could transform data storage
A scientist examines a DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) profile on a screen. Photograph by Tek Image, Science Photo Library Illustration and animation by Diana Marques Video research by Patricia Healy Shakespeare's entire catalog of sonnets and eight of his tragedies, all of Wikipedia's English-language pages, and one of the first movies ever made: scientists have been able to fit the contents of all these works in a space smaller than a tiny test tube. They didn't somehow miniaturize them, though. Instead, they used DNA—the building block of all life—to encode the information in these creative works and store it at a microscopic scale. As humans adopt advanced tools like artificial intelligence, tomorrow's currency will be data. Already, tech giants like Microsoft are raising billions of dollars to construct data centers for AI. And there's a very real 'Storage Wars' scramble underway right now to figure out how to preserve and safeguard exponentially increasing amounts of data. Football field-size, gigawatt energy-sucking data centers are one option. Or DNA storage could be an energy-efficient, compact solution. (Ancient DNA, from Neanderthals to the Black Plague, is transforming archaeology) Step 1 Computers store each letter or pixel of digital data in combinations of ones and zeros. We typically think of DNA as a blueprint or instruction booklet—its sequences of As, Ts, Cs, and Gs tell molecular machines how to build the fabric of our very beings. DNA storage flips this paradigm on its head. Computer data make up the inputs, and DNA is the end product. A handful of start-ups are working to perfect the conversion of binary computer code into physical DNA strands, and in doing so, take a shot at disrupting the multibillion-dollar storage industry. Here's how they plan to move the industry away from microfilm, microfiche, disks, and servers. Traditional data storage relies on constant migration to prevent old data from degrading or the technology it's stored in from becoming obsolete. Varun Mehta, CEO of Atlas Data Storage, compares long-term data storage to painting the Golden Gate bridge—by the time you've gone from one end to the other, the first end is rusting and you have to start all over again. 'The same thing happens with long-term data storage,' he says. 'You're always moving from your old tape to your new tape.' He predicts that 'people who want to get off that treadmill will be the first to move to DNA.' Step 2: Encoding digital data in DNA Step 2 To store digital information on DNA, algorithms convert digital codes into combinations of the four letters that represent DNA's chemical bases—T, G, A, and C. In practice, DNA storage involves several steps: deciding on a code, making the DNA using a process called synthesis, and storing the resulting DNA strands. DNA storage methods also include ways to categorize the stored strands and convert nucleotide sequences back into information that may be compatible with computers or accessible in some other way. Though industry members formed the DNA Data Storage Alliance in 2020 in part to set standards, companies in the DNA storage space still approach each of these steps in slightly different ways. (This archaeologist hunts DNA from prehistoric diseases) First, to store information as DNA, scientists have to determine how the data will be translated. DNA is a base 4 system; in contrast, computers store and process information in binary. Instead of assigning a '1' or a '0' to each DNA nucleotide—an A, C, T, or G—you could instead assign a particular combination of two digits to each base—so an A might stand in for '00,' C '01,' T '10,' and G '11.' Theoretically, this means every DNA nucleotide can encode up to 2 unique bits. In practice, the system isn't as efficient as that (there are certain combinations of DNA nucleotides that are less stable or otherwise undesirable, and different chemistry protocols exist for turning bits into DNA bases). Catalog, one DNA storage company, announced in 2022 that it had encoded eight of William Shakespeare's tragedies into a single test tube. To do this, scientists had to translate about 207,000 words into strings of nucleotides using a class of enzymes called recombinases. They claimed their DNA-building machine, Shannon, encoded the plays into millions of nucleotides in a matter of minutes. 'To each of those words, you associate a random bit vector. A bit vector is just a sequences of ones and zeroes of a fixed length,' explains Catalog's head of DNA Computing, Swapnil Bhatia, in a video for the company. The word 'rose' might have a random bit vector stretching 1,000 numbers long, and different companies will have different ciphers for translating words into 1s, 0s, and nucleotides. Step 3: Synthesis Step 3 These letters are one part of the nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA. Today, scientists are using them to build DNA strands that can store digital data instead of genetic information. DNA synthesis—the step of actually creating custom DNA strands—is another place where companies diverge in their methods. Catalog uses the principles of inkjet printing to exude tiny droplets containing premade DNA fragments. In each droplet, hundreds of thousands of chemical reactions take place per second to elongate the DNA strands. Atlas Data Storage, meanwhile, relies on semiconductor chips and silicon wafers as the environment for assembling strands of synthetic DNA. 'Once those strands are assembled, we harvest them from our chip,' Mehta says. 'These DNA strands really are like corn stalks growing in a field on this chip and once they've gotten to the height that we want—to the number of bases—then we harvest them.' (Dog DNA tests are on the rise. But are they reliable?) Step 4: Storing the DNA Step 4 The strands are archived in material like sealed vials or other materials. Storing and preserving these synthetic strands presents another set of hurdles. Catalog and Atlas store DNA samples inside metal capsules, where the strands are not exposed to the elements and degraded. To convert DNA back into bit form, one can sequence it—using the same technology that powers genetic testing like 23andMe. This method can't be done indefinitely; eventually, the sample will need to be copied over again to restore it. To create longer-lasting, accessible storage, some groups are working on fluorescent tags. Shining a light on the samples can tell researchers information about a given sample at a glance, the same way metadata can help us organize computer files without having to open them. If companies are able to surmount these challenges, a DNA storage system would take up a fraction of the space of traditional storage methods. 'The theoretical limit is astounding,' Mehta says. 'You could fill 50 petabytes worth of data in in a Tylenol-sized capsule'—or roughly 50,000 times as much data as an iPhone can store. Step 5 When it's time to retrieve digital data from DNA, an algorithm converts the archived information back to ones and zeros– and then back into pixels and letters that we can read. Storing information in such a small physical package raises philosophical questions about the purpose of storage. Could a storage device itself serve a purpose? Scientists have theorized and created proofs-of-concept of fabrics and everyday items like glasses that contain DNA-stored information. The company Catalog has a branch dedicated to 'DNA computing' to search and analyze synthetic DNA without first converting the information encoded in it back into bits. There could be some advantages to working with data in DNA form—rather than moving from one end to another, like a computer processor does, working with the data can occur in many places at once in parallel. DNA's status as the basic building block of life may someday make it one of our most durable technologies, Mehta says, because it means it isn't going anywhere. 'One thousand years from now, there probably will not be any DVD players. In fact, it's hard to find a VHS tape player anymore. But that's never going to happen with DNA, because we need it for our own health,' he says. 'We'll always have that technology available.' A version of this story appears in the August 2025 issue of National Geographic magazine.
