Who spends the most time checking e-mail, surfing the Web or using their laptops for additional non-academic purposes during law school lectures? It’s not third-year students, as many law faculty members have long assumed. Actually, second-year law students are the worst offenders, according to research conducted by a doctoral candidate.
Kim Novak Morse, associate director for writing support at Saint Louis University School of Law, has devoted her dissertation to the matter; she’s going for her doctorate in higher education at Saint Louis. She said she hoped to provide empirical data to better inform the debate about classroom laptops bans, since much of the previous research has been based on student surveys rather than classroom observation.
