The Mere Presence of a Cell Phone and Academic Ability

Prior research has suggested that cell-phone use in the classroom and during learningrelated tasks is detrimental to academic performance. Recently, the mere presence of a cell phone has been found to negatively affect relationships and to impair performance on learning and cognitive tasks. The present study explored whether the presence of a cell phone hinders performance on tests that measure pre-existing academic ability. In total, the study evaluated 45 participants who were enrolled in an introductory psychology course at Mount Royal University or who were members of the general public. Three subtests from the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT-4) were completed: spelling, sentence comprehension, and mathematics. During testing, half of the participants had their cell phones present and the other half did not. Statistical analyses revealed that when a cell phone belonging to a participant was merely present, there was no statistically significant difference in the demonstration of pre-existing skills on the sentence comprehension (p = .52), spelling (p = .07), and mathematics subtest (p = .11) compared to when a cell phone was removed. Unexpectedly, a non-significant trend was observed in the opposite direction; that is, the cell-phone-present group outperformed the cell-phone-absent group on all of the subtests