In 370 BCE, the Greek philosopher Socrates warned that this new-fangled business of writing would lead to forgetfulness in students if they no longer had to remember everything. The advent of the printing press in the 15th century and television in the 20th century sparked the same moral panic: technology was a dangerous force set to rob our young of their senses, turn brains to mush and leave society in ruins.

We see a similar demonisation of the newest breed of technology. Detractors argue that “modern” technology - in the form of the internet, social media, smartphones, streaming sites and the rest - is making us isolated, angry, unsociable, unable to sleep or process detailed information. We’ve become poor at communicating and restricted in outlook, trapped in echo chambers. Civilisation, they claim, is screwed.

This hostility can be witnessed most openly in education: it’s not just concerns about the devices and media used and experienced outside the classroom having a potential impact on learning, but also fears about the adoption of tech within the classroom walls, too. It has led many - particularly those with column inches to fill, politicians, education consultants, scientists and teachers themselves - to cast themselves as protectors of vulnerable young minds from this new scourge. No tech here, please, we’re teaching.

Such is the concern in education that one would assume there must be file after file of research to stand up this rap sheet. Yet, for all the pearl-clutching rhetoric, it turns out that there’s very little hard evidence about the impacts of new technology on children’s brains and how they learn. Smartphones, tablets, apps and social media are inventions that have only become widespread in the past few years, so there hasn’t been enough time for good-quality, long-term studies to catch up with them.

Yet - as one might expect for such a hot topic - scientists are on the case, and the early indications are that the true story of the impact of tech on learning is likely to be a little more nuanced than many would have you believe.

The case against tech

One of the biggest hitters in the field of research into the impact of tech - sometimes known as cyberpsychology - is Larry Rosen, emeritus professor of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills. His latest book, The Distracted Mind, co-written with neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley, explores how well (or not) human brains are coping with the current onslaught of technology.

“We do know that digital technology captures all the senses much better than something like TV, and certainly much better in the classroom than a teacher might,” Rosen says. “It’s the new shiny object in our world, and it can be very distracting.”

As Rosen explains, we make decisions by gathering information from the world around us and feeding it through a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex (the bit behind your forehead). This acts as a master controller, telling us where to direct our attention at any given moment. The problem is that this prefrontal cortex is the last part of the brain to fully mature, and keeps developing from birth all the way through until someone is in their early twenties. And this is where the distractingly shiny nature of digital tech - with all its beeps and buzzes and notifications - presents a challenge.

“We have ancient brains and they’re not suited to constantly having to gather more and more attentional resources, [and] we simply don’t have them,” Rosen says. “Our brain architecture and chemistry doesn’t allow it.

The longer studying takes, the more stressed out you get

“Kids are trying to make decisions about where to allocate their scant resources of attention and, instead of thinking through the process and gathering information, all those attentional resources are given to whatever seems to be the most salient and most obvious thing in the environment - and that’s usually this new technology.”

Through his work with college students - which he views as a reasonable proxy for younger children, too - Rosen has found that, while studying, they will tend to focus on work for a few minutes then flip their attention to their phone or social media notifications. Brain-scanning studies have revealed that this flipping focus reallocates blood from one part of the brain to another. That takes a while to get back, even once a person returns their attention to studying, leading to less efficient learning.

“What that means is two things,” he explains. “One is that whatever you’re trying to learn will take you longer. Two: it’s going to add a layer of stress on to life. The longer studying takes, the more stressed out you get because it’s keeping you away from things that are clearly more entertaining and more fun.”

That would seem like a pretty damning verdict - lock up the smartphones!

But although Rosen’s work suggests that all this beeping and buzzing can be a barrier to learning for older kids, it would be unfair to label all types of technology as unhelpful to all children.

Dr Amanda Carr, director of psychology at Canterbury Christ Church University, is investigating the effects of technology on learning and development in younger age groups.

“Actually, there’s surprisingly little solid research in this area,” she explains. “It’s quite frustrating as a scientist because there are a lot of claims made, but many of those are unfounded and based on more general fears about our children.”

Rather than lumping all kinds of digital technology together, she argues that content - as well as the way that children interact with devices - is more important.

One big problem is that technology is moving so fast that scientists are struggling to keep up. Whereas research carried out just a couple of years ago might have involved a chunky laptop and clunky mouse, the latest devices are all touchscreen-based. It’s an area Carr and her colleagues are actively researching at the moment.

“One thing we do know is that the more interactive a child can be with an activity the better,” she explains. “Sitting in front of a screen passively watching a video isn’t so good, because children are naturally active explorers of their environment. Touchscreen technology allows a bit more of that kind of interaction with digital content, and that’s really important.”

Jacqui Pedder, a special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) coordinator at a small primary school in West Sussex, agrees that some types of tech can be beneficial in the classroom. She’s worked in education for 25 years and has watched the new wave of digital technology coming into schools.

“For example, phonics teaching programmes are really useful tools to show children how to identify letters and sounds, and they can all play games with an interactive whiteboard or iPad. It’s the same thing with maths as well: practising number recognition and basic sums.”

However, Pedder has noticed one area where technology does seem to cause a problem. “We did a speech and language research project in our school, and what we found was that more children were coming in having not really acquired the basic skills that we might have expected just a few years ago - being able to listen to someone and concentrate on what they’re saying, making eye contact and human interaction.

“It’s all about the social cues that you get from people when they’re talking to you: non-verbal cues, body language, negotiation skills and turn-taking. You can’t get that from a computer.”

This issue is enhanced for children with SEND, particularly autism, or those who are already socially isolated because of family circumstances. Pedder has noticed that these pupils want to spend a lot of time on an iPad or similar devices, and are often heavy users at home.

“I asked one child in my class last year what his favourite bedtime story was, and he said ‘YouTube’. That’s what it meant to him. Because some kids aren’t getting much social interaction at home, they find when they come into schools that it’s very difficult. So they’re naturally drawn away from things they find difficult into using a computer because that’s very predictable, safe and familiar.”

Force for good?

Pedder’s observations are echoed by researchers such as Dr Nicola Yuill, who heads up the Children and Technology (Chat) Lab at the University of Sussex. She’s looking in depth at the impact of technology on children with autism and whether it helps or hinders them. It’s certainly been suggested that some children are more drawn to losing themselves in digital media, particularly videos and repetitive, predictable games.

But, as Yuill argues, this isn’t intrinsic to the technology itself but rather to the way that apps and tasks are designed.

“If we think that technology is isolating, there is nothing intrinsic about technology that says it should be so,” she points out. “It could just as easily be designed to support people working together.”

She and her team have proved this through experiments with pairs of autistic children using a touchscreen table.

“We give them tasks - something like a sorting or matching task that they’re really interested in - but we set it up in a way that they can’t move on unless the other child has also done something in the same way. You’re constraining what they can do dependent on someone else, so they have to pay attention to them.

“We don’t have to explain it to them, but they figure it out. I think of it as a like a three-legged race: you can take your own independent actions but you also have to be aware of what the other person is doing and synchronise your action with them.”

There is potential for technology to encourage collaboration between pupils, teachers and the family

Although the wider benefits of this kind of approach for autistic children still need to be proven with long-term follow-up, Yuill is enthusiastic about the potential for technology to encourage collaboration and interaction in general between pupils, teachers and the family. And with the increasing pervasiveness of smart devices at school and at home, there’s an opportunity to turn them into tools for interaction and collaboration, rather than isolation.

To echo the tech evangelists, it’s not the tech that counts, it’s how you use it. Yes, there are some early indications of a detrimental impact (though as pointed out these lag behind technological advancements and are limited in scope) but that might be down to how we use it, not something fundamentally ingrained in the technology itself.

So let’s just use it properly, you might argue. Well, the problem is, we don’t really know what works and what doesn’t. We can’t just rely on our intuition either, as it seems to be the case that some tools that appear very engaging to children may not actually be helping them to learn.

Yuill has carried out studies looking at mothers and children sharing a story either via a traditional paper book or through a screen. In terms of recall of the story, they didn’t find any difference at all between the two media.

However, the picture gets more complicated when enhancements such as games and animations are added in. She highlights recent research showing that if stories contain a lot of games, children spend a significant proportion of time playing them, yet recall less information than tales with relevant animations and sound effects.

This idea fits with the latest research coming from the world of neuroscience, showing that computer games hit the brain’s pleasure and reward centres hard, diverting attention away from less shiny and fun learning tasks.

“We have to be really careful when we’re talking about a child’s engagement with learning and technology,” Yuill warns. “If it’s engagement just because they’re trying to score points, that might not the best kind.”

Dr Jenny Radesky, an expert in child development and behaviour at the University of Michigan, agrees - both as a scientist and a parent. She argues that children (and adults) need to figure out how to use technology in ways that are going to expand our horizons instead of just keeping us stuck in the same loop: jumping to every notification, hooked on games that just reiterate the same skills, or glued to videos on YouTube.

“Technology should be something that we’re using intentionally to create new things - things we would never have been able to do before. Doing something creative like making a stop-motion animation or song that we wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise,” she says. “For example, I like the coding apps that my seven-year-old son brings home, because I think they’re challenging kids to do new things.”

A switched-on approach

Yet, even if we manage to gather research that leads us towards more creative, interactive applications that benefit rather than hinder learning, there’s still the problem that Larry Rosen raised of the distracting stranglehold that new technology exerts over students’ concentration and learning.

Luckily, there are some things that students, teachers and parents can do to loosen its grip. Interestingly the advice from those who produced that research is not a blanket ban on devices, as seems the convention in most schools and in most homes. It simply doesn’t work to just take the technology away.

“What we find is that if you take phones away from people, those who are the most heavy users of their phones show increased anxiety within 10 minutes,” says Rosen, “And that rise continues until you give them back the phone.”

This technological anxiety - more colloquially known as #FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out - releases the stress hormone cortisol, which interferes with a child’s ability to focus and learn. In some cases, not having the phone could be as much of a barrier to learning as having it.

Instead of a ban, Rosen recommends a study technique called “tech breaks”, which starts with letting students look at anything on their phone or computer for one minute.

“Mostly, we’re talking about communications,” he says. “So, check your email, check Facebook, check your messages …whatever. And then - if you’re using a computer - don’t minimise those windows but close them completely, because otherwise they send you notifications. “Set your phone alarm for 15 minutes, then set it on silent and turn it upside down. Get on with your work and then, when the alarm goes off, you can check everything again for one minute.”

This concept of healthy habits highlights the role for parents and teachers as ‘tech mentors’

By repeating these cycles - gradually expanding the time up to a maximum of half an hour - you’re effectively conditioning your brain to switch focus from phone to study. The phone is in sight so there’s no anxiety, and there’s also the promise of a reward. It’s a technique that seems to work well in all kinds of settings from home to classroom (including for easily distracted feature writers, I must confess).

This concept of healthy habits highlights the role for parents and teachers as “tech mentors” and curators of children’s digital experiences, helping children to build a positive relationship with new technology while avoiding being consumed by it. Rather than schools being tech-free zones, there is a suggestion they should lead the way in promoting good usage.

“We create meaning around everything, and the way that we use media as tools today is going to be internalised by children in terms of the meaning they make from it,” explains Radesky, who was part of the team that pulled together the American Academy of Pediatrics recent guidelines on children and media use (bit.ly/AAPguidelines).

“That’s particularly important in the first five to 10 years of life,” she adds. “Because then kids will see digital media and technology as something that’s a useful tool, rather than something that they just consume.”

Developing situation

Yet for all this discussion, there’s still a noticeable paucity of solid, long-term research pointing out the best way forward. We also need more sophisticated measurements of how children use technology. After all, we’re expecting them to use computers and the internet to help with their homework - not to mention carrying a permanently connected smartphone - so it shouldn’t be surprising that they’re spending more time than ever before online. These devices themselves could even provide more accurate data on usage and habits.

“In terms of where we need to go, I think the simple answer is we just need more evidence,” Carr says. “It’s always going to be a difficult area because people have a lot of feeling about it, and there’s a lot of fear about it as well.”

There are signs that the academic world is getting up to speed

There are signs, though, that the academic world is getting up to speed.

“I think there are some disciplines that have taken a long time to catch up to all of this, but it’s becoming more important for developmental scientists,” says Carr of her own field. “We still need some good solid longitudinal research, and it’s frustrating as a researcher to see all these claims made in the media.”

Those claims are rife in education, too. It’s understandable: children are vulnerable, so teachers and parents want to make sure that every child is successful in adult life by protecting them from anything they feel may threaten that. But the case against tech just doesn’t stack up yet, and certainly not in the way many educators would have you believe.

Perhaps one day it will be proved that, finally, the technological bogeyman of our age does indeed deserve its reputation, but for now we would do better to assist the researchers in finding out rather than deciding that the case has already been closed.

Dr Kat Arney is a science author, broadcaster and co-presenter of the BBC Radio 5Live Science show