Education Commons^™

Class Participation As A Learning And Assessment Strategy In Law: Facilitating Students’ Engagement, Skills Development And Deep Learning, Alex Steel, Anna Huggins, Julian Laurens

Alex Steel

Well designed assessment can be a vehicle for encouraging students to learn and engage more broadly than with the minimums required to complete the assessment activity. In that sense assessment need not merely ‘drive’ earning, but can instead act as a catalyst for further learning beyond what a student had anticipated. In this article we reconsider the potential roles and benefits in legal education of a form of interactive classroom learning we term assessable class participation (ACP), both as part of a pedagogy grounded in assessment and learning theory, and as a platform for developing broader autonomous approaches to learning …

Clarifying Assessment: Developing Official Typologies And Instructions For Forms Of Assessment In Law, Alex Steel

Alex Steel

Law students are expected to complete a range of assessment throughout their degree, and do so with varying levels of success. Increasingly, research has examined the ways in which student performance can be enhanced. While much focus has been on how to best to provide students with feedback that can be acted on, this paper examines the extent to which standardisation of the way in which assessment tasks are described could assist students. The use of the same name to describe different variations of an assessment task can create confusion for students and for new members of staff. Research demonstrates …

‘Works Well With Others’: Examining The Different Types Of Small Group Learning Approaches And Their Implications For Law Student Learning Outcomes, Julian Laurens, Alex Steel, Anna Huggins

Alex Steel

In the current regulatory climate, there is increasing expectation that law schools will be able to demonstrate students’ acquisition of learning outcomes regarding collaboration skills. We argue that this is best achieved through a stepped and structured whole-of-curriculum approach to small group learning. ‘Group work’ provides deep learning and opportunities to develop professional skills, but these benefits are not always realised for law students. An issue is that what is meant by ‘group work’ is not always clear, resulting in a learning regime that may not support the attainment of desired outcomes. This paper describes different types of ‘group work’, …

Answering Legal Problem Questions In A Grid Format, Alex Steel, Dominic Fitzsimmons

Alex Steel

The development of legal reasoning skills is a fundamental aspect of legal education. What has sometimes been called “learning to think like a lawyer” is a threshold competency that students must acquire before they can progress to more complex analysis of broader legal issues. This chapter discusses the use of problem-based scenarios to both engage students and to develop legal analysis. It outlines the threshold difficulties students must overcome in order to read texts as a lawyer and explains how use of a grid format answer – rather than an essay format – can both assist students to overcome these …

Mind The Gap: How Law Professors, Academic Support Professionals, And Students Can Fill In The Formative Assessment Gap, Heather Zuber-Harshman

Heather Zuber-Harshman

This article serves to accomplish three things. First, to provide students with feedback tools that will help them achieve academic success and improve the quality of their law school experience. Students who do not receive feedback or receive inadequate feedback should use the provided forms to proactively and creatively find ways to obtain feedback. They should never be afraid or too proud to ask others for assistance with generating this feedback.

Second, to encourage professors and Academic Support professionals who believe students should receive adequate feedback to take steps towards providing the feedback.

Third, to provide Academic Support professionals with …

The Psychology Of Hope: Legal Educators Must Strengthen Students' "Waypower" To Succeed, Cassandra L. Hill

Cassandra L. Hill

The power of hopeful thinking is often undervalued. According to C.R. Snyder, the father of hope theory, hope reflects a mental set in which we have the willpower to move toward a goal and the “waypower” or mental capacity to devise effective methods, plans, or paths to reach that goal. Both the willpower to succeed and the waypower to solve problems are required to have a truly hopeful attitude. Applying this formula to legal education, if law students lack either the willpower or the waypower for their goals, they cannot have high hope to succeed. And hope is a key …