Kids Who Own Cell Phones Score Lower On Reading Tests: Study

Parents who hand their elementary schoolers a personal cell phone may be doing more harm than they realize, at least when it comes to reading. A new study out of UCLA found that children who owned their own phones scored lower on reading comprehension tests than peers who did not, raising fresh concerns about the long-term effects of early phone ownership on kids’ academic development.

Reading scores among elementary school children in the United States have been falling in recent years, and researchers have been searching for explanations. Cell phones are an obvious suspect: ownership rates among young children have been climbing fast, and a Pew Research Center survey found that 72% of U.S. high school teachers say cell-phone distraction is a major problem in class. But surprisingly little research had focused on whether phones were hurting younger kids. This UCLA study set out to fill that gap, examining third and sixth graders specifically.

Researchers found a split picture. Having a phone sitting right next to a child during a test did not hurt their performance in the moment. But simply owning a phone was linked to noticeably lower reading scores overall. That distinction between short-term and long-term effects turned out to be one of the study’s most telling findings.

Inside the UCLA Cell Phone Study

Researchers at UCLA recruited 106 children across third and sixth grade, all living in Los Angeles County and attending schools where instruction was in English. About 57% of the sample was female. Reflecting the diversity of the region, 42% of participants came from English-speaking homes, 30% from Arabic-speaking homes, and 28% from Spanish-speaking homes. Data was collected between July and December 2024.

For the core experiment, 37 children who had brought their phones to school on the day of testing each completed two reading comprehension tests. During one test, their phone sat face-up and turned on right next to them. During the other, a researcher took the phone away entirely. A standardized reading test, the kind widely used in schools, measured how well children understood short passages. Stories and conditions were rotated among participants to account for any advantage from test order.

Children who did not have a phone with them that day took the same two tests, allowing for a separate comparison. All participants also filled out a short survey about whether they owned a phone, when they got it, and what they were allowed to do with it, including calling, texting, and playing games.

Reading Scores and Cell Phone Ownership

Phone ownership among these kids was already outpacing national figures from just a few years prior. In this 2024 sample, 46% of third graders and 70% of sixth graders reported owning their own phones. National data from 2021 had put those figures at around 31.5% for third graders and 54% for sixth graders.

As for the core experiment: having a phone nearby made essentially no difference. Kids answered about 89% of comprehension questions correctly when their phone was present, compared with 87% when it was not, a gap too small to mean anything statistically. Notifications were also a non-factor, largely because almost no one received any during the brief, seven-minute tests.

Published in Behavioral Sciences, when researchers looked at phone ownership as a longer-term factor, the picture shifted. Across all 106 children, owning a personal phone was linked to lower reading comprehension scores, even after accounting for grade level. Although the link was still correlational, phone ownership came before the reading tests, which the researchers treated as satisfying one condition needed to eventually establish cause and effect.

A Surprising Twist for Bilingual Families

One of the more unexpected findings involved children from non-English-speaking homes. Among sixth graders in that group who owned phones, those who had started texting earlier showed better reading comprehension scores. For kids from English-speaking homes, the same pattern did not appear; if anything the trend ran the opposite way, but it was too weak to be statistically meaningful.

Among sixth graders from non-English-speaking homes who owned phones, those who had access to games on their first phone also scored better on reading comprehension than those who did not. The researchers offered a possible explanation: for children who are learning English as an additional language, texting and gaming may provide informal, real-world practice with English reading and writing outside of school, potentially offsetting some of the downsides of phone ownership seen in the broader group.

Should Parents Be Worried About Cell Phones and Reading?

Researchers were careful about what their study cannot prove. Because this was not a randomized experiment tracking kids over years, it cannot conclusively say that giving a child a phone causes lower reading scores. It is possible that children who are already struggling in school are more likely to be given phones. But the researchers argued that explanation was unlikely, pointing out that more than half the sample owned phones, making it unlikely that a majority of participants were struggling academically. Research on why parents give kids phones also suggests that boosting poor grades is not typically the motivation.

On the policy side, the findings do not provide an academic rationale for banning phones in elementary school. Having a phone at school on the day of testing did not affect reading performance compared with kids who left their phones at home. Where bans might actually help, the researchers speculated based on earlier research, is in improving kids’ social lives at school, where face-to-face interaction tends to build closer relationships than phone-mediated communication.

A 19-year-old quoted in the study offered a candid take on why phone presence did not hurt test scores: “Nobody looks at their phone when they are taking a test.” It is a reminder that adult fears about phone distraction do not always match how children actually behave during structured tasks.

Researchers also raised another wrinkle: children whose phones were taken away may have felt anxious about the separation, which could have depressed their scores in the no-phone condition, potentially canceling out any distracting effect the phone itself might have caused. If that is true, the study may actually be underestimating how disruptive phone presence can be.

For parents wondering when to hand a child their first phone, this study offers a compelling suggestion: waiting until after elementary school may be the safer bet for reading development.

---

Disclaimer: This article describes an observational, cross-sectional study. Its central result, the link between owning a personal cell phone and lower reading comprehension, is a correlation measured at a single point in time, not proof of cause and effect. Phone ownership preceded the reading tests, which satisfies one condition for a causal relationship, but other factors could still explain the pattern. The experimental portion of the study, which tested whether a phone’s presence during a test affected scores, involved 37 children, a small sample. Subgroup findings for children from non-English-speaking homes rest on even smaller numbers. Longer-term research following children over several years would be needed to confirm whether early phone ownership shapes reading development.

---