Reducing digital distractions during study can improve academic focus. A educational psychologist investigated the impact of using a smartphone lock-box (a container that physically locks the phone away for a set time) on reducing the frequency of phone screen checks during study.
She conducted an experiment using a sample of 12 college students obtained via snowball sampling. In the first week, participants studied for a 3-hour session as normal and self-recorded the number of times they checked their phone. In the second week, participants used a smartphone lock-box on their desk during a 3-hour study session and recorded their screen-check frequency. The data collected is presented below:
| Participant | Number of phone checks during a 3-hour study session | |
|---|---|---|
| Without phone lock-box | With phone lock-box | |
| a | 15 | 11 |
| b | 22 | 19 |
| c | 30 | 22 |
| d | 27 | 23 |
| e | 19 | 15 |
| f | 9 | 11 |
| g | 25 | 23 |
| h | 13 | 13 |
| i | 23 | 24 |
| j | 17 | 11 |
| k | 21 | 18 |
| l | 22 | 22 |
Outline one strength of using the standard deviation rather than the variance as the measure of dispersion for the data collected in this study.
