The use and abuse of screens by minors worries and occupies paediatricians, who have decided to go beyond the debate on whether or not to prohibit the use of private cell phones during school hours to directly question the digitalization of teaching.
The Digital Health working group of the Spanish Association of Pediatrics (AEP) has prepared a document of recommendations “based on scientific studies” that advocates limiting the use of mobile phones by students or families in schools “at any age ” and suggests also reevaluating the need to continue using digital screens and devices for educational purposes.
“In medicine, when the use of a new drug is approved, it is mandatory to carry out experimental studies with control groups to demonstrate that the new drug is better than those that already exist and side effects are also monitored; in applications that claim to have an educational purpose, the same criteria should be followed, but this is not done,” says Dr. María Salmerón, coordinator of the working group that prepared the document.
In this sense, pediatricians emphasize that the use of screens in teaching has not shown to date improvements in learning compared to reading on paper or handwriting, an argument that they support in the systematic analysis on this topic carried out by the academic journal of the Australian Educational Research Association.
The document from the Spanish Association of Pediatrics makes it clear that its recommendation is not to generally prohibit the use of educational applications in classrooms, but rather that they be used for a specific purpose and as long as they have been supported by scientific studies to determine if they provide an improvement in learning compared to what already exists.
Because, say pediatricians, the social, family, educational and scientific debate about the impact that screens have on health throughout life and especially in childhood and adolescence and that they can affect neurodevelopment, psychoaffective development , learning and the establishment of healthy lifestyle habits in children, reading and writing on paper should be given priority in schools.
And when digital tools are used for educational purposes, they believe that the applications used should specify the time of use that the student needs to carry out the activity and establish automatic mechanisms to avoid excess exposure and report that the total daily screen time recommended by scientific societies to avoid potential risks is zero minutes until the age of two, less than one hour a day between the ages of 2 and 5, and less than two hours from the age of 5.
And if teachers use digital tools for students to carry out activities, it should always be “on devices that are property of the school, configured to prevent access to inappropriate content, with specific accounts for exclusively teaching use with the objective to reduce the risks of access to age-inappropriate information and, at the same time, ensure access to the devices for all students at the center,” say the pediatricians.
Another aspect addressed by the document prepared by the AEP is the need to eliminate from educational applications “games, strategies related to immediate gratification or any mechanism that encourages addictive behaviors or excessive screen use.”
