After a public high school in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA completely "de-technized" the classroom, students' self-perceived reading skills improved significantly, triggering a rethinking of the use of electronic devices in the classroom.
According to reports, Maureen Mulvaney, an AP literature and English teacher at Washburn High School, launched a "low-tech classroom" experiment last year. Having long been plagued by problems such as plagiarism, student distraction and declining literacy rates, she decided with the support of her parents to ban the use of mobile phones and laptops in class, requiring all coursework to be completed with pen and paper.
In September before the trial began, Mulvaney asked students to self-evaluate their reading ability through a questionnaire. Only about 46% of students expressed confidence in their reading ability. After several months of "low-tech" classes, by February of the following year, the proportion of those who expressed confidence climbed to 95%, a significant change. In an interview with local TV station KARE 11, she said the message sent by the students is: "We have a lot of problems in education, and the solution given by the children is to go back to low-tech ways and go back to the practices that worked in the past."
In order to help students gradually adapt to a classroom environment without electronic devices, Mulvaney did not adopt an "immediate ban" approach, but started with 10 minutes of silent reading and handwriting practice every day. She recalled in an article in The Minnesota Star Tribune that the first day was "pretty rough" for most students, with many stopping halfway through the page. She explains to her students that it's like weight training, "you don't just start with 80 pounds."
After several months of training, by February, most students were able to write at least two pages at a time, and some students were even able to complete five to six pages of long handwritten essays. The survey shows that about 79% of students believe that it is easier to write and organize ideas on paper than to write on a screen. One student told a local TV station that returning to writing with pen and paper was "actually quite fun," adding that classmates seemed to be more connected after being away from electronic devices.
Another student, Khalil Omar, said that after this experiment, he started to like writing by hand instead of typing on his laptop. He mentioned that when writing on a Chromebook, it is easy to have the urge to "look it up", such as looking up the definition of a word; while when writing on paper, he can focus more on his own expression. Some students pointed out in Mulvaney's article that using pen and paper meant "there was no temptation to use artificial intelligence." In order to complete the assignment, they had to force themselves to come up with ideas, "so I really thought about it."
Mulvaney's classroom experiment was viewed by some observers as a "breath of fresh air" in the current educational dilemma. In recent years, teachers at many universities and middle schools in the United States have complained about the rapid decline in students' reading skills. After the rapid popularization of artificial intelligence tools, the problem of plagiarism and ghostwriting of homework has become more and more prominent. Studies have pointed out that frequent reliance on artificial intelligence to complete tasks may weaken critical thinking skills and lead to a decrease in brain activity levels when writing, which further exacerbates concerns about the use of electronic devices and AI in the education sector.
It is worth noting that this experiment not only excluded smartphones from the classroom, but also explicitly prohibited the use of laptops. Although many schools currently have mobile phone bans, they still allow students to bring and use laptops to complete classroom tasks, and laptops can also access the Internet, play games, or access AI tools. For a long time, laptops were seen as a necessity for learning, but some experts are beginning to question that assumption and argue that a re-evaluation of their role in the classroom is needed.
Mulvaney wrote in the column that the results of the experiment indicate that the problem may not be unsolvable and that students can make substantial progress in a short period of time by changing the learning environment. She emphasized, "The children have not changed, what has changed is education itself, and we need to return to practices that have been proven to be effective." Currently, as the debate on how to balance technology application and learning effects continues, this Minneapolis high school’s “low-tech classroom” experiment is providing the education community with a real-life case worthy of continued observation.