Law Commons^™

Using Student Evaluation Data To Examine And Improve Your Program, David I.C. Thomson

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

At many schools, directing a legal writing program today is quite different than it was even 10 years ago. As LRW faculties mature and the individual faculty members grow in the profession, the need for a “top-down” director is lessening or going away in many programs. However, in many schools there remains a valuable leader/coach sort of role for a director, whether that person rotates, coordinates, or however it works in practice that is best for the school. This new sort of director is ideally someone who is able to encourage and support a culture of programmatic excellence and is …

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’, …

Unsw Law School In The Assessment Project, Alex Steel

Alex Steel

This chapter outlines the approach UNSW Law took to developing a whole of curriculum approach to assessment . It included an audit of assessment practices, surveys of student attitudes and experiences and the development of program and course learning outcomes that were mapped across the curriculum.

Peer Review Across The Curriculum, Patricia G. Montana

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In 2007, two very influential institutes published reports that challenged legal educators to reconsider how they design courses, deliver instruction, assess their students’ learning and explore new ways to prepare students for the profession of law. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching published its report, Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (“Carnegie Report”), and the Clinical Legal Education Association published its study, Best Practices for Legal Education (“Best Practices Report”) (collectively, the “Reports”). Both Reports came to the same conclusion: law schools must devote more attention and resources to helping students develop the professional skills …

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 …