Israel: 94 percent of high school students use phones during class according to study

Public domain image/ MaxSem via Wikimedia Commons

Researchers from the University of Haifa came up with some surprising, or not so surprising depending how you look at it,  statistics about cell phone use during class time for high school students in Israel.

The study revealed that 94 percent of high school students in Israel access social media via their cell phones during class, according to the study conducted at the University of Haifa’s School of Political Sciences by Dr. Itai Beeri and research assistant Dana Daniel.

The study, which included 591 pupils in grades 9-12 and 144 teachers of various subjects in three Jewish high schools noted the more common uses of cell phone use during class to include accessing social media or file-sharing sites (94%), taking pictures or making recordings (95%), emails and texts (94%)and even talking on the phone during class, and astounding 91%.

Researchers point out that based on their findings, “there is almost no moment during any class when some pupil isn’t using their cell phone.”

It was also discovered that the stricter the teacher, the more cell phone use during class occurred.

In addition, other factors that played a part in the findings were the difficulty of the subject matter (math vs. humanities for example) and the grade the student was in (12th graders used the cell phones less than 10th graders).

Of the 591 students interviewed, only 4 percent reported not using their cell phones at all during class.