Would you believe it: a teacher and her students say their reading ability soared after banning tech in the classroom.
Maureen Mulvaney, an AP Literature and English teacher at Washburn High School in Minneapolis, started the low tech experiment last year after becoming frustrated with plagiarism, distracted students, and plunging literacy rates.
And so, with the enthusiastic support of parents, she banned phones and laptops, requiring all coursework to be done with pencil and paper. The turnaround was quick and resounding, and despite some initial resistance from students, they quickly fell in love with the old, analog ways of doing things.
In September, before the experiment started, just 46 percent of Mulvaney’s students said they felt confident about their reading ability. By February, that share shot up to 95 percent.
“We’re having a lot of trouble in education and I think what my kids told us was that there is a solution and the solution is to go low-tech. Go back to the old ways of doing things,” Mulvaney told local TV news station KARE 11. “Remove all the distractions and we can get our kids back.”
Mulvaney let her students ease into a tech free environment. First, they started with just ten minutes of silent reading and writing by hand. Still, the first day was “rough,” she wrote in an essay in The Minnesota Star Tribune. Most students quit after just half a page of longhand composition.
“I told the kids this is like lifting weights,” she told KARE 11. “You don’t go in and you don’t start with 80 pounds.”
By February, most students could write at least two pages, and some were cranking out five or six pages. A striking 79 percent of the students said it was easier to write and organize their thoughts on paper than on a screen.
“It was honestly really fun,” one student, Rue Falbo, told KARE 11. “I enjoyed not being on tech and I think that everyone connected a little bit more.”
Khalil Omar said that after the experiment, he enjoyed writing by hand more than typing on a laptop. “On a Chromebook, I might be tempted to maybe look something up, find a definition of something. But when I’m on paper, I feel like I can use my writing for me,” he told the outlet.
“When we use paper, there’s no temptation to use AI,” another student told Mulvaney in her essay. “I have to force myself to come up with my own ideas. So I do.”
The results of Mulvaney’s experiment are a breath of fresh air in a suffocatingly dire atmosphere of professors and teachers lamenting that their students can’t read anymore, which is on top of all the rampant cheating that AI tools have facilitated. Many blame AI and phones, as there’s mountains of evidence showing the deleterious cognitive effects of both (AI impairs critical thinking and leads to lower brain activity while writing essays, according to the latest research.)
What’s particularly interesting here is her decision to ban laptops, too, which often skirt by without blame in these discussions. Schools are banning phones, but not the portable computers students can game, shop, and talk to AI models on. For decades, the assumption has been that laptops are an indispensable learning tool, but experts are now pushing back on the idea.
It’s also promising how quickly Mulvaney was able to achieve her results. Perhaps the issue isn’t as impossible to conquer, and the negative cognitive effects of being addicted to advices as irreversible, as it seems.
“Kids haven’t changed,” she wrote in the op-ed. “Education has, and we need to go back to what works.”
More on education: College Students Are Rapidly Losing the Ability to Read