Cell phones in classrooms today can be a lot like the comic books kids would hide inside their textbooks in decades past. The difference, though, is that cell phones also have important practical uses, and a role to play in school. Teachers, administrators, and students themselves continue to try to work out what that role should be.

There’s nothing wrong with cell phones in a classroom, Arnold L. Glass believes, as long as they are used for academic purposes, to help students learn.

A new study that Glass, a psychology professor at Rutgers, and his Rutgers’ colleague Mengxue Kang published this summer found that allowing students free personal use of cell phones during class reduces their long-term retention of the material studied. This effect, the researchers found, holds not only for the student using the phone, but for other students sitting nearby.

Allowing cell phones in classrooms but making sure they help, rather than hinder, students’ work dovetails with the policies in place at several local school districts.

The Rutgers study followed two sections of an upper-level college class in cognitive psychology that Glass teaches at the New Jersey university.

Each section met twice a week, and on one day per week — opposite days for each of the two sections — students were allowed to use their cell phones for personal use while they participated in class. In the phone-use days, a large majority of students reported looking at their phones for personal reasons during the lectures, while a few said that they had not looked at theirs.

There was no significant effect on students’ short-term retention, Glass found, as measured on immediate in-class quizzes during phone-use class days, but their later unit-exam and final-exam grades dropped an average of seven points because of wrong answers to questions about the content studied during the days when students used phones.

And it wasn’t only the students who had used the phones whose grades fell — their classmates’ grades fell too.

Glass told The Enterprise that he tells students, on the first day of class, that he cannot allow them during class to use personal electronic devices for non-academic reasons.

He tells new students, “I would feel that I was behaving unethically, to allow you to do something which would cause you to do worse on the final exam, given my own overwhelming evidence that you will do worse on the final exam.”

Asked later in an email how students respond when he tells them this, Glass wrote, “I don’t know their private thoughts. I imagine that many are annoyed. However, they comply without complaint.”

“Complicated web of filters” at Guilderland

“This is kind of an evolving area,” said Marie Wiles, superintendent of Guilderland schools, on the use of electronic devices in class. The policy Guilderland enacted in March 2017, she said, recognizes that cell phones have the potential to be useful and to be disruptive.

The message of the policy, Wiles says, is that students can have their cell phones but that, if they are to be used in class, they must be part of a lesson, with teachers asking children to use them in some way.

Students use computers with internet access in the classroom, and, there, a “complicated web of filters” determines which websites students can access and which they can’t, Wiles said. Students would not be able, for instance, to access Facebook, Wiles said, although YouTube is open to students because of its potential for academic use. Sites that can be accessed change with grade level, she said.

“There’s a lot of teacher discretion” about how cell phones may be used, Wiles said. Some teachers may say that they don’t want to see them, while others may use them for quick quizzes and others may sometimes allow students to use them to play music that helps them concentrate.

Guilderland is currently giving an individual laptop computer to every student in grades 5 through 12 with those in the sixth grade and higher allowed to take them home at night, like a textbook. This 1:1 Chromebook initiative will likely change the way cell phones are used in the future, Wiles said.

Mya Konecny, who is starting her senior year at Guilderland, said she has been known to bump into things as she texts friends on her cellphone while walking from one class to another. She plays games — she is “obsessed,” she says, with Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp — on her phone during study halls or when she has finished and handed in a test, but never during class instruction: “That’s a no-go.”

In her experience, cell phones are sometimes useful in certain classes — for instance, checking the meaning of words, with Google Translate, during French class, at times when the teacher is busy helping someone else.

She has heard and read about the negative effects that sneaking cell-phone use in school can have on learning, she says, adding, “I don’t want to fail.”

A lot of kids push the limits — as kids do, she said — by using apps like Snapchat at their desks, to take photos of their desk or the side of their face and send it to a friend, along with a quick message — the modern equivalent of old-fashioned note-passing in class.

It’s hard not to push the limits, she said, to use the technology available to stay connected to friends.

Some kids go further, she said. A girl in her geometry class would regularly place a lunchbox on her desk and watch Netflix behind it, until one day when her teacher moved the box aside.

Told about Glass’s research, Konecny said she agrees that use of cell phones in a classroom affects other students, because it’s easier, sometimes, to focus on what other kids are doing than what a teacher is saying. “It’s an easy distraction,” she said.

At Voorheesville, too, “disruption” not allowed

At Voorheesville, too, cell phones are allowed in school, as long as they are not used in a disruptive way, explained Superintendent Brian Hunt.

“If we’re in the classroom and you’re on your cell phone, and I tell you to put it away, and you don’t, that would be disruptive,” Hunt said.

Occasionally, cell phones are used as part of the learning experience, Hunt said, adding that he knows of at least one teacher who sometimes uses cell phone applications in the classroom.

“But it’s got to be at the teacher’s discretion,” he said.

And, as at Guilderland, internet filters are used to restrict the sites that students can access on school computers.

“The standard’s got to be, if you’re in a classroom situation and you’re using a device, you’re to be using it for the purpose of instruction. We don’t want to see you surfing on some other website that’s not appropriate, or that isn’t relevant to the class,” Hunt said.

“So we do monitor that,” he added, “and in general, kids are good about this.”

Berne-Knox-Westerlo administrators did not return calls seeking comments on cell-phone use and policies in the rural district.

Connected childhood

Cell phone ownership is common in middle schools and almost ubiquitous in high schools in the United States.

According to a 2015 Pew Research survey, 73 percent of all teens aged 13 through 17 own a smartphone or have access to one. The same survey found that another 15 percent had a basic cell phone, and that 12 percent had no phone at all.

A 2012 study by Elizabeth K. Englander — for the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center, about cyberbullying — looked into elementary- and middle-school-age children’s ownership of cell phones.

By third grade, she found, more than 90 percent of Massachusetts children surveyed were online, mostly playing games. Of those third-graders, 18 to 20 percent reported having their own cell phones.

The percentage of children with their own phones rose to 25 to 26 percent by fourth grade and to 39 percent by fifth grade. By middle school, Englander’s study reported, most children owned cell phones with full internet and text-messaging access.

One of the ultimate goals, Wiles said, is to teach kids to “be savvy and sophisticated and careful users” of technology.

“It’s the world we live in,” she said.

Glass told The Enterprise that college students generally do respond to his advice when he tells them that use of devices for personal reasons during class will affect their grades, particularly since most of them, or their parents, are making a significant financial sacrifice to pay for college.

But, he said, he continues to innovate in his classes, “to find ways to command their attention and optimize their performance.”