Screens in Education: Balancing Potential and Cognitive Costs

Glaucio Aranha

In contemporary education, screens make previously inaccessible content visible and enable experiences of guided observation, deliberate practice, and formative feedback at scale; at the same time, they reconfigure attention, memory, and sleep — precisely the cognitive pillars of learning.

In applied fields such as health professions education, recent syntheses indicate that video‑ and simulation‑based approaches yield measurable gains in knowledge and skills when designed with pedagogical intentionality (Morgado et al., 2024). It follows, therefore, that structured debriefing, clear observation criteria, and metacognitive tasks are examples of good practice.

In immersive contexts, virtual reality has shown particular utility in anatomy and procedural training as a supplement to traditional instruction (Mergen et al., 2024), which suggests that the sensory realism of the audiovisual device must be anchored in instructional objectives and rigorous assessment. In the same vein, it is worth recalling that immersive environments can provoke cybersickness, hyperstimulation, and visual fatigue — adverse effects mapped in a recent systematic review (Simón‑Vicente et al., 2024) — with direct implications for sustained attention and the consolidation of learning.

Recently, Sweden made explicit a re-balancing in educational technology by announcing “more reading time and less screen time,” reinstating the principle of “one textbook per pupil and subject” and strengthening funding for printed materials and school libraries. The official note frames screens as supplementary rather than the default in classrooms. The move was publicly contextualized by system-level indicators: in PISA 2022, Sweden remained above the OECD average (mathematics 482 vs. 472; reading 487 vs. 476; science 494 vs. 485) while declining in reading and mathematics compared with 2018; in PIRLS 2021 (grade 4), Sweden’s average dropped from 555 (2016) to 544 (2021), feeding the government’s emphasis on literacy, teacher-led reading and handwriting in early grades. In short, this is not a ban on technology but a textbook-first prioritization in domains where print shows stronger returns for sustained reading and attention, keeping digital tools purpose-built and justified.

In Norway, the debate took a technical-advisory route via the Skjermbrukutvalget (Committee on Screen Use), which issued NOU 2024:20, a comprehensive review of evidence on screens’ impacts on children’s and adolescents’ health, well-being, and learning, recommending prudent use (e.g., strict limits in early childhood, ergonomics, routines, and mediation) and guardrails for school and family contexts.

In the Netherlands, a national rule has been in force since 1 January 2024 stating that mobile phones are not allowed in classroom settings in secondary education (with exceptions for educational purposes, medical needs, and accessibility), extended to primary and special education from 2024/2025 — a governance instrument to protect attention and the social climate. Across these cases, governance choices (textbook-first, clear device rules, task design) — rather than devices per se — structure current reforms, supported by comparative educational indicators and technical-policy assessments.

Beyond localized gains, the cognitive picture changes when we observe very frequent use. Among young children, the most robust meta‑analysis of recent years, produced by Bustamante and colleagues (2023), found no overall association between “screen time” and executive functions in those under six, suggesting that content, context, and family mediation weigh more than the crude exposure metric. In school‑age children and adolescents, however, the temporal and situational framing matters: consensus panels and prospective cohorts show that bedtime screen use — especially with notifications active, stimulating content, or devices kept in the bedroom — reduces sleep duration and increases sleep‑related complaints, with indirect educational effects via daytime sleepiness, fluctuating attention, and poorer working memory the following day (Hartstein et al., 2024; Nagata et al., 2024).

In young people and adults, controlled experiments indicate that nighttime smartphone use suppresses melatonin and alters sleep architecture, although under certain conditions of device shutdown before falling asleep, acute deficits in declarative recall are not always observed; the point here is that sleep hygiene functions as a decisive moderator (Höhn et al., 2024) — and it is often compromised.

In higher education, the question is no longer “screens, yes or no,” but rather “which practices and what governance of attention.” At the population level, a meta‑analysis by Paterna and collaborators (2024), including nearly fifty thousand students, found a negative— albeit small — correlation between problematic smartphone use and academic achievement; that is, greater problematic use was associated with poorer academic performance. This signals the existence of consistent cognitive costs caused by frequent distractions, rapid task switching, and divided vigilance (Paterna et al., 2024). The diagnosis is not technophobic; it merely shifts the focus to the need for task designs that change the medium’s relevance to the learning goal; attention to notification management; criteria for intervals of attention recovery; and the structuring of practices that convert audiovisuals into support for the semantic organization of content rather than into noise. In health education, for example, this can be translated into clinical videos with meaningful pauses and probing questions; simulations with briefing/debriefing that make reasoning heuristics explicit; and parsimonious use of virtual or extended reality, according to the predominant skill type and students’ tolerance for visual symptoms (Morgado et al., 2024; Mergen et al., 2024; Simón‑Vicente et al., 2024).

Put differently, screens can enlarge the didactic power of seeing‑and‑interpreting when they bring relevant patterns to the fore, when they protect sleep, and when they minimize attentional competition. They can, however, impoverish meaning when they colonize rest time, when they privilege salient stimuli over conceptual relations, and when they install a regime of micro‑interruptions that erodes working memory.

In health professions education, where learning hinges on learning to observe, judge, and act, it is worth preferring uses that integrate audiovisuals and reflection, as well as explicitly teaching the importance of attention management and sleep literacy, for it is in this arrangement that benefits outweigh harms (Morgado et al., 2024; Hartstein et al., 2024; Nagata et al., 2024; Paterna et al., 2024).

Let this reflection close with a simple image: learning with screens requires rhythm and care— which means choosing when to look and when to suspend the gaze, when to advance and when to breathe between images; it means accepting that intelligence is made of pauses, of protected sleep, of shared attention, and that good mediation turns glare into work light and noise into meaning. In practice, we educate better when we offer students a pedagogy of pause and presence: videos that invite questions rather than mere consumption; simulations that return to the body the measure of the gesture rather than only the performance of the outcome; routines that preserve rest as part of study. Thus the screen ceases to be an end and returns to being an open window onto the world, but with a frame — so the world does not devour us while we learn to name it.

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