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August 13, 2025
A new research informed toolkit has been developed entitled TAPS (Toolkit for Assessing Phones in Schools) to evaluate the impact of schools’ phone policies. To fill this gap, the team at the Tech and Society Lab at NYU in partnership with the Stanford Social Media Lab developed this toolkit between February and August 2025 and it has been designed as a free, accessible, and standardized set of surveys designed to help elementary, middle, and high schools evaluate the impact of their new phone policies. There are a total of four surveys, one each for students, teachers, parents, and administrators. They have tailored surveys for use in elementary (K–5), middle school (grades 5–8), and high school (grades 9–12). This information was originally posted here.
How does TAPS work and how do you use it?
The surveys are structured around a number of outcomes related to school life and student well-being that are likely to be affected by phone use and policy changes. The students can speak to changes in their attention, sleep, and social life while the teachers can assess classroom dynamics and administrators can provide school-wide data. Parents offer insights into what’s happening at home.
Sample questions are both qualitative and quantitative. Examples of questions include “For this school year, what is the Average Daily Attendance (ADA) percentage at this school? For this school year, what is this school’s suspension rate? How many reported bullying incidents have there been this school year? How many reported cyberbullying incidents have there been this school year?”
The short version of surveys are about 5-8 minutes for the teacher and student versions. The longer version takes about 15-20 minutes to complete
The student and teacher short versions of the TAPS surveys take about 5–8 minutes to complete and focus on the most critical constructs which are from validated instruments in the scientific literature and provide a fuller picture across a broader range of constructs.
The developers suggest integrating pre-post design design to understand whether phone policies are working. For example, schools who begin their phone policy on January 1, 2026 should administer the survey three months into the school year and then repeat the next year at a similar time including regular follow ups in coming years.
They offer both digital and printable versions of these Google docs and forms surveys.
The developers offer step by step guides for Individual schools and multi schools testing, that can be found here.
To learn more about TAPS and how it can be used at your school, please click here.
Photo by Ron Lach on pexels
