| Legal educators are routinely banning students' laptops or wireless connectivity in law classes. Faculty assumes students are significantly off-task and in-class laptops are harmful to learning. Current research focuses almost exclusively on undergraduate students technology uses in- and out- of the classroom. Only a handful of studies objectively measure in-class laptop use and have found conflicting results about the impact of in-class laptops on learning or grades.;For this study, first, second, and third year law students' in-class laptop use was tracked through sustained observations for an entire semester in five different law classes to determine the extent and nature of their off-task behavior. Additionally, this study examined whether students' accumulative time off-task predicted their final course grade after controlling for LSAT scores, Undergraduate GPAs, and other variables. The study further examines whether there are certain students off-task more than others and thus warrant special laptop policies. The findings from this study indicate that first, first-year law students (n = 52) were off-task 35% of the entire semester (SD = 22%). Second year students (n = 20) were off-task 42% of the entire semester (SD = 30%). And, finally, third year students (n = 23) were off-task for 28% of the entire semester (SD = 28%).;Second, no matter how the students were grouped and their respective off-task means compared, there was no statistically significant difference, with a statistical power to detect large effects, among the groupings based on the: (a) year of the student, (b) type of class, (c) time of the class, (d) seat location within the classroom, (e) gender, and (f) type of final exam.;Lastly, the results indicate that a higher or lower amount of time off-task does not predict a higher or lower final course grade after controlling for LSAT, UGPA, class seat, and final exam type. |
