Social media is hurting your kid’s test scores, researchers say

Social media use is hurting your kid’s grades - and it doesn’t matter how long they are spending on devices each day, new research warns.

Just an hour spent on an app daily can knock down test scores by one or two points, for students between the ages of nine and 13, doctors at UC San Francisco found in new research.

However, students who spent as many as four hours a day on social media saw up to a five-point drop on their tests.

"That really speaks to the dosage effect of these [apps]," psychologist Sheri Madigan, who wrote an accompanying editorial for the study, explained. “It's problematic at really high uses, but it's also problematic at even in small doses."

That’s bad news for students who already have trouble performing academically.

Scores in reading and math have taken a dip across the country since the pandemic, and a recent Arizona State University report found the average American student is “less than halfway to a full academic recovery.”

In spring 2023, the percentage of fourth-graders who were performing at grade level in math and reading was down by 13 percent and seven percent from 2019, respectively.

It doesn’t take much to make a negative impact on academic standing, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill psychologist Mitch Prinstein told NPR.

"Even a slight change in what they look like after a short period of time means that they're kind of now pointed on a trajectory that is different from others,” he said. “That means that two, three, five years from now, we might be talking about some very significant gaps between kids who might have been heavy users or not as heavy users."

Prinstein, who was not involved in the new study, noted that the research appears to confirm that kids are having a hard time focusing due to “the ways in which social media has changed their ability to process information.”

Research in the area is still developing, but a handful of international studies have linked social media use to reduced attention span.

A 2019 National Institutes of Health study determined that teenagers who spend over two hours a day on their screens receive lower test scores.

Smartphones are unending sources of distraction, experts say.

The new study’s authors previously found high levels of addiction-like symptoms among kids and teens between the ages of 10 and 14 who used smartphones.

"Half the kids who had smartphones said that they lose track of how much time they're using their phone..." UCSF pediatrician Jason Nagata told NPR. "And 11 percent say that social media use has negatively affected their schoolwork."