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Phones can be useful tools in classrooms to remind students of deadlines or encourage more exchange between students and teachers. At the same time, they can be distracting. Students report using their phones for non-academic purposes as often as 10 times a day. Thus, in many classrooms, phones are not allowed.

Now, researchers in the US have investigated if letting students use their phones for very brief amounts of time—dubbed phone or technology breaks—can enhance classroom performance and reduce phone use.

"We show that technology breaks may be helpful for reducing cell phone use in the college classroom," said Prof Ryan Redner, a researcher at Southern Illinois University and first author of the Frontiers in Education study. "To our knowledge, this is the first evaluation of technology breaks in a college classroom."

The shorter, the better

Throughout a full term, the researchers experimentally evaluated the effectiveness of technology breaks, lasting one, two, or four minutes, respectively. In some of the bi-weekly sessions, the researchers introduced equally long question breaks as a control condition.

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