Phones in a box, grades on the rise: 16,683 students just showed what focus can do

At the start of each lesson, the phones went into a box. That was the whole intervention — and across 10 higher-education institutions in Odisha, India, a randomised trial with 16,683 students, published in Science, found it worked: students in phone-free classes earned higher grades over a full semester, and the students who had been struggling most improved the most, narrowing the gap with their classmates. Lead researcher Andreas Bjerre-Nielsen of the University of Copenhagen notes the part sceptics rarely predict: students who lived through phone-free lessons came out more supportive of the rules, not less. Teachers, observed the team, also spent less time on their own phones.

SDG 4 · Quality education — Mechanism: behaviour campaign