The dynamics of digital instruction, learning outcomes and equitable access can be complex, with no one-size-fits-all approach. As researchers learn more about best practices, educators are tasked with putting their findings into practice — a job harder than it sounds. Now, districts are confronting new challenges as they seek to deliver instruction remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We asked four experts to share their views about screen time: Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a faculty fellow in psychology at Temple University; Peter Bezanson, CEO of BASIS Educational Ventures; Nicol Turner Lee, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation; and Bryan Phillips, CTO of Hoover City Schools in Alabama.

Watch educators from CoSN2020 dispell some related myths about students and screen time. 

EDTECH: Research about the effects of screen time varies widely. How would you characterize this issue and the effort to balance technology in schools?

HIRSH-PASEK: We’ve gotten some handle on use patterns. We’re learning as fast as we can. The problem is that the moment you think you’ve learned something, the technology changes. That’s about to happen again with augmented and virtual reality. This is a matter of time and figuring it out.

BEZANSON: As a member of Generation X, I tend to look suspiciously at screen time, but I don’t think the research backs that up. We’ve embraced it when we can control the screen enough for it to be a piece of educational technology rather than a gaming device. We teach kids how to respect the tablet as something from which they can gain knowledge — and to know when to put it away.

TURNER LEE: I’ve had this debate with higher-income parents trying to take tablets away from their kids and make the case that screen time overall is not helpful. Often, the conversation around screen time is done from a middle-class perspective. As a result, we forget that not all children have access to internet-enabled hardware.

What COVID-19 has revealed is that in our important conversations around this topic, we may be missing a few factors, including what access looks like for lower-income students and how many types of devices they have available at home. Research has found that these kids have less access to multiple devices within the home. Our ability to determine whether the kids in Silicon Valley have too much screen time versus the kids in certain parts of Anacostia in Washington, D.C., is really the question that this pandemic is surfacing for school districts struggling to engage in distance learning.