Elementary schoolers with their own phones scored lower on reading tests — whether or not the device was in the room. The findings complicate the case for classroom phone bans.

Across the country, schools have been locking phones in pouches, collecting them at the door, and banning them outright, on the theory that a buzzing device in a backpack is the enemy of concentration. A new study from UCLA suggests that, at least for younger children, the problem may not be where the phone is. It may be that the child has one at all.

Published in Behavioral Sciences, the research found a statistically significant link between owning a personal cellphone and lower reading comprehension scores among third and sixth graders. Crucially, it made no difference whether the phone was on the student’s desk or out of sight during testing.

“We found that there’s no age at which you can give a child a phone that’s better or worse for reading comprehension, so it’s just having a phone at all,” said lead author Patricia Greenfield, a UCLA psychology professor. “That’s true in third grade, and it’s true in sixth grade.”

A question with little evidence behind it

For all the public anxiety about children and smartphones, the authors point out that remarkably little experimental work has examined how phones affect reading in elementary school students. They identified only two prior studies in that age group, and those pointed in different directions: one found that texting helped children grasp meaning, while the other found it hurt basic reading mechanics at the level of letters and words.

Greenfield’s team set out to ask a sharper question: does getting a phone relate to how well children perform on reading comprehension tests, and does having the device nearby during a test interfere with the focus that reading demands?

The researchers worked with a culturally and linguistically diverse group of students in Antelope Valley public schools and in Coptic Church schools in Los Angeles County — settings where phones were ordinarily permitted. Some children owned phones and some didn’t; among owners, some had their phones with them at school and others did not. Each student read short passages and then answered questions about them, and each completed a survey about phone ownership and use.

Ownership, not proximity

The central finding was consistent: children who owned phones understood less of what they read than children who did not. That relationship held for students who spoke English at home and for those who didn’t.

Just as notable was what the study did not find. Phone placement had no measurable effect on scores. A device on the desk and a device tucked away produced the same results. The researchers weren’t able to test whether notifications were distracting, for the simple reason that students received almost none during the sessions. And the age at which a child reported getting a first phone showed no correlation with comprehension.

“The children who brought their phones to school had the same reading scores as children who did not have phones at school that day,” Greenfield said. “So, it’s ownership of a phone, not the immediate presence of one, that correlates with poorer reading comprehension at the elementary school level.”

That distinction matters for policy. If the presence of a phone in the classroom isn’t what’s associated with poorer comprehension, then banning phones during the school day may not, on its own, move reading scores for this age group. Whatever is going on likely happens elsewhere — in how children spend their time once a phone becomes part of their lives.

It is worth stressing that the study is correlational. It shows that phone ownership and weaker reading travel together; it does not establish that the phone causes the gap. Families who give young children phones may differ in other ways that also bear on reading, and the study’s design doesn’t untangle those threads.

A twist for bilingual families

The research also turned up a more hopeful result for one group. Among students from homes where English was not the primary language and who owned phones, reading comprehension was significantly better the earlier they had started texting.

“If you have a phone and if you’re from a family where English is not spoken at home, it’s better for reading comprehension to start texting earlier rather than later,” Greenfield said. “In fact, when students from Arabic- or Spanish-speaking homes began to text in second or third grade, by sixth grade they had reading comprehension scores similar to their peers who still did not have phones.”

One possible reading of that result is that texting, for children navigating two languages, functions as extra practice with written English — an informal, high-frequency literacy exercise that may offset some of the costs associated with phone ownership. The study doesn’t test that mechanism directly, but it suggests that the effects of phones on reading are not uniform across children.

What bans might still do

None of this means classroom phone restrictions are pointless. The authors argue that even if bans show no academic effect on reading through sixth grade, keeping phones out of elementary classrooms should still strengthen children’s social skills and relationships by encouraging more face-to-face interaction with classmates and teachers. That, they note, is an important question for future research.

For parents weighing when to hand over a first phone, the study offers no magic age. What it does offer is a caution: the device’s influence may extend well beyond the hours it spends in a backpack.

Co-authors include Marola Hanna, a postgraduate research assistant; Rocio Burgos-Calvillo, a doctoral student; and Laura Rhinehart, an assistant research professor, all at UCLA. The work was supported by a grant from the Flora Family Foundation.

---

Notes

1. Greenfield, P. M., et al. Study on cellphone ownership and reading comprehension in elementary school children. Behavioral Sciences 16, no. 8 (2026): 1263. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-328X/16/8/1263
2. University of California, Los Angeles. “Kids who own cellphones have poorer reading comprehension scores than those who don’t, researchers find.” News release via EurekAlert!, July 27, 2026. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1137795