Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee, , 2:39:59 to 2:44:04
Officials discuss research on the impact of excessive screen use and AI on student academic performance and well-being, noting correlations with classroom disruption and emotional regulation.
Topics: Education, Artificial intelligence
Speakers: Ms. Meg Brighton, Speaker 14, Unknown Speaker, Senator Marielle Smith
at the heart of this we would say it's all about purposeful the important the importance of devices is about purposeful use of devices.
>> Yeah. >> Um and obviously the minister was talking about with youth you know we was looking at to see how screens and artificial intelligence and everything is affecting them. So obviously um devices um can have um impacts on them. Um is there evidence suggests that screens are a big distract distraction
um a couple of threads of that. So the PISA data for a number of years have pointed to um uh at the headline level the PISA data talks about um uh classroom disruption and uh when you dig underneath the data that disruption is that low-level disruption that comes from being distracted by one's own device or by other devices. So that's what PE is pointing to. But McCory University have also done some more recent research that talks to I think on their survey about 84% of high school students, 50% or 57% of primary school students are pointing to those levels of disruption um and distractions from screens in class. Um
>> and is it leading does the data show that like uh that the distractions lead to um to poorer um education outcomes?
So certainly the work that we've been doing for education ministers for their meeting on Monday, we've been looking into um what's what is the research saying about the impact of use and um it's not an all or nothing but what the data is pointing to is excessive use is actually having an impact on academic performance. I think the Pisa data with maths performance talked to um an excessive amount of screen use and you saw a correlation to what was happening with students maths uh results uh and certainly there's work out of bookings in the US and a range of other leading research organizations about screen use
>> and what about um student well-being um when it comes to um excess even high amounts of screen use is there what's the data showing about the well-being and obviously we're going to really curious to see what the youth survey says about um all the all the the digital um lifestyles and everything. But what what's what's your uh what are you seeing?
>> Yeah. Well, certainly what what we're seeing in terms of both in school use but out of school use and um the impact on well-being goes to students interaction with social media, what's happening in social media. We had a very strong feedback through the anti-bullying review that's been done around um how screens and that form of communication was impacting overall student well-being. So if we look at the impact on excessive use on student learning combined with the um personal use of devices and impact on well-being, there's this great opportunity for education ministers to get together on Monday and have a conversation about what do they want to do collectively and nationally about how screens are used in
schools. Yeah. And so the work being underway like um so how are we going to be looking at at what we can do about
>> Yeah. So some of the research that um our paper that we're preparing for education ministers has looked at is um there was analysis of a meta research a meta analysis of like 23 different uh research limbs and that pointed pretty significantly to a high use of screens had uh poorer emotional regulation and that goes to one's ability to um not only self-regulate but co-regulate with others and it also diminishes your capacity to engage with humans. Yeah. >> Um and you start to diminish those core capabilities about how you get on in the world.
>> I have two nine-year-old nieces and I see their love for for Roblox and Minecraft and all these other >> really can be wonderful things, but they can also, you know, really affect that uh the ability to be able to have that face to face conversation or to be able to go out and play in the dirt and get dirty and everything. So, yeah. No, absolutely. Thank you very much. Yeah.
>> Thank you, Senator. I'm returning to Senator O Sullivan.