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Children who open social media accounts at the start of secondary school appear to perform worse in tests than those who delay, with researchers suspecting that the constant checking for updates is a major distraction for many students.
Pupils who opened their first social media account aged 11 to 12 scored lower in mathematics and reading tests than those who waited a few years, with scores at age 16 differing between the groups by the equivalent of about six months of learning, the study found.
The work does not prove social media is to blame, but the researchers took account of many other factors that could skew the results, such as the students’ academic performance before they had social media, their family structure and parents’ education.
“I think we now know there is a problem and that it’s a complex problem, to do with how these platforms are built,” said Dr Marco Gui, the first author on the study at the University of Milano-Bicocca in Italy. “Our research shows that at least during pre-adolescence, these social media are problematic.”
Gui and his colleagues analysed surveys on the social media habits of more than 5,000 Italian schoolchildren and their results in standardised maths, Italian and English exams. When tested at age 13 to 14, those who had opened their first social media account at 11 or 12 scored worse than those who waited until at least 14 years old. The score gap at age 15 to 16 remained the same for Italian and widened for maths.
Writing in Nature Human Behaviour, the researchers say the difference in scores is roughly equivalent to the early adopters falling behind by six months of schooling. Put another way, the benefit to those who delayed social media was about half that achieved with intensive and costly tutoring.
While a performance gap was evident for maths and Italian, there was no impact on English, which the students were learning as a foreign language, possibly because so much social media is in English, providing “incidental exposure and practice”, the researchers said.
One of the best predictors of the performance gap was how often children picked up their phones throughout the day and night, suggesting that constantly checking social media was at least partly to blame.
“We speculate that one of the mechanisms is the continuous state of alert that social media used on a smartphone exerts on minors’ lives. The continuous need to check messages, to see if something is happening in the online world, why you are engaged in something in the physical world you have around you,” Gui said. “This means being less present in the physical space of the family or the house. And from a cognitive point of view, it could mean being less engaged in something that takes time, as homework can for a student of that age.”
The study comes as the UK is poised to introduce a social media ban for under-16s, following Australia which brought in its own ban last year. While Gui favours an age limit on social media, he said a ban was an “emergency policy” and that work was needed to make the platforms themselves safer and less addictive. “For pre-adolescents we have to work on diminishing the social relevance of these environments,” he said.
Dennis Ougrin, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Queen Mary University of London, said the work added to growing evidence that the age at which young people first engaged with social media may affect their educational development. “The message for parents, educators and policymakers is not necessarily to ban social media, but to support young people in developing healthy habits when interacting with social media,” he said.
