The Persistent, Solvable Malady of Law Student Multimedia Multitasking

In today’s world of popular and enticing social media platforms that constantly lure the attention of students away from course work, many professors find it difficult to keep the attention of their students. There is good reason to be concerned. There are numerous studies from multiple countries at the undergraduate, graduate, and professional school level that find multimedia multitasking during the learning process is detrimental to knowledge retention and grades. This article summarizes many of these studies.

More importantly, this paper significantly adds to the body of work on multimedia multitasking by providing anecdotal evidence of its negative effects on U.S. law school grades via a comparison of two years’ worth of survey results on multitasking to final grades in one of the author’s courses. With the goal of providing ample tools for professors to use to combat multimedia multitasking, this article also reviews published solutions, reveals what specific tools worked at stemming multimedia multitasking in the author’s course, and, most significantly, presents a basic multimedia multitasking avoidance strategy that provides several tools from which to choose.