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• Posted July 30, 2026

Cell Phone Ownership Linked To Lower Reading Skills In Elementary Students

Cell phones could be blunting young children’s reading skills, a new study says.

Elementary school students who simply owned a cell phone scored worse on reading comprehension tests, researchers reported recently in the journal Behavioral Sciences.

Whether the kid had the cell phone on them at school played no role in their score. Instead, phone ownership itself was linked to poorer reading comprehension, researchers said.

“The children who brought their phones to school had the same reading scores as children who did not have phones at school that day,” lead researcher Patricia Greenfield said in a news release.

“So, it’s ownership of a phone, not the immediate presence of one, that correlates with poorer reading comprehension at the elementary school level,” Greenfield said. She is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Researchers made this surprising discovery during an experiment intended to see whether school cell phone bans might improve learning among elementary school students.

To see whether cell phones interfered with the concentration needed to do well on exams, researchers asked 55 sixth-graders and 51 third-graders in Los Angeles County to take a reading comprehension test twice.

Among those 106 kids, 60 said they owned their own cell phones — 22 third-graders and 38 sixth-graders. The day of the experiment, 37 of the kids brought their phone to school.

During one test, the students who brought their phone to school were asked to keep it out and next to them while they worked. In the other test, they were asked to put away their phones.

Results showed that having the cell phone out during a test made no difference. Those children scored about the same with or without the phone next to their test.

However, owning a personal cell phone did influence reading scores. Children who owned a phone exhibited poorer reading comprehension than those who didn’t, results showed.

“The implication is that parents concerned about reading skills should avoid giving children their own cell phones during elementary school,” researchers wrote in their paper.

They noted that the age at which a child was given their cell phone did not appear to have any bearing on their scores.

“We found that there’s no age at which you can give a child a phone that’s better or worse for reading comprehension, so it’s just having a phone at all,” Greenfield said. “That’s true in third grade, and it’s true in sixth grade.”

The research team could not say why owning a cell phone might damage the reading skills of elementary students. 

“Longitudinal research is needed to establish whether early phone use affects subsequent reading comprehension development, whether children with stronger reading skills are more likely to engage in particular phone-related activities, and whether both outcomes are influenced by unmeasured third variables,” researchers wrote.

Researchers did find one nugget of good news for kids from homes where English isn’t the spoken language. The earlier these kids started using their phone to text, the better their reading comprehension.

“If you have a phone and if you’re from a family where English is not spoken at home, it’s better for reading comprehension to start texting earlier rather than later,” Greenfield said. “In fact, when students from Arabic- or Spanish-speaking homes began to text in second or third grade, by sixth grade they had reading comprehension scores similar to their peers who still did not have phones.”

More information

The California Learning Research Network has more on how phones affect students in school.

SOURCES: UCLA, news release, July 27, 2026; Behavioral Sciences, July 27, 2026