Law Commons^™

Legal Education And Nextgen: Recommendations For Transitioning To A New Assessment Model, Wanda Temm

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Demonstrating Law Library Value Through Mission-Centered Assessment, Amanda Watson, Amanda Karel, Amanda Runyon, Leslie Street

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper presents a history of evaluation in U.S. academic law libraries, shares survey results about our collective professional mindset, and offer practical steps for law libraries that are ready to abandon a pervasive culture of evaluation.

Law School News: Rwu Law Home To 'Stellar Faculty': Princeton Review 02/02/2022, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Law School News: Rwu Law Introduces Required Course On Race And The Law 06/28/2021, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

When Your Plate Is Already Full: Efficient And Meaningful Outcomes Assessment For Busy Law Schools, Melissa N. Henke

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The American Bar Association (ABA) accreditation standards involving outcome-based assessment are a game changer for legal education. The standards reaffirm the importance of providing students with formative feedback throughout their course of study to assess and improve student learning. The standards also require law schools to evaluate their effectiveness, and to do so from the perspective of student performance within the institution’s program of study. The relevant question is no longer what are law schools teaching their students, but instead, what are students learning from law schools in terms of the knowledge, skills, and values that are essential for those …

Law School News: 'Injustice Dehumanizes Everyone It Touches' 1-31-2020, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

2019-2020 Annual Report: Roger Williams University School Of Law, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

How To Create A Stunning Video Orientation By Hand, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

This article describes the multi-faceted approach UGA Law Library took with their fall 2018 first year student orientation. It describes the process of the creating a virtual tour experience, pairing it with a hybrid face-to-face event, and assessing the impact of all aspects of the orientation. The creation of the video itself involved a multi-media approach using a combination of visual arts and technology to animate a product that has a longer expiration than traditional video or in-person library orientations offer.

Designing Effective Legal Research Rubrics: The Foundation For Successful Assessment, Carol A. Watson, Katie Hanschke, Zanada Joyner

Presentations

Increasingly librarians are teaching many, if not all, of the legal research courses at their law schools. Most librarians are not experts in education assessment design. Assessment with rubrics creates a learner centric environments in which instructors objectively evaluate student progress and assures that students receive consistent and meaningful feedback. Rubrics provide both students and instructors with a clear understanding of whether learning outcomes have been achieved. Guided by the instructors' experience and an in-depth review of the literature law librarians will be exposed to the best practices when creating rubrics including alignment with the course goals and instructor expectations.

Externship Assessment Project: An Empirical Study Of Supervisor Evaluations Of Extern Work Performance, Margaret Reuter

Faculty Works

Field supervisors’ evaluations of their student externs are packed with lively stories. They deliver a fly-on-the-wall perspective, giving us color about the work entrusted to our students, the behaviors our students exhibited, and the enjoyment the attorneys reaped. The authors decided the evaluations were so fertile that they should be systematically scrutinized to seek meaningful, reliable insights about the extern experience, especially regarding the variety, complexity, and responsibility levels of their work. We also saw a prime opportunity to assess an externship program and find ways to improve it. Thus, the Externship Assessment Project was born. We deployed qualitative data …

What Did They Know And When Did They Know It? Pretesting As A Means Setting A Baseline For Assessing Learning Outcomes, Jeffrey L. Harrison

UF Law Faculty Publications

Are legal rules intuitive or, at least, consistent with common sense? In this study, 260 law students at five law schools who had not taken contract law, were presented with eight questions based on specific contracts cases or common contracts issues. They were asked what they felt was the fair or right answer to each question and to formulate the rule they would apply. The purposes of the study were to 1) determine whether contract law is what the untrained person believes it is or should be and 2) experiment with a strategy of pretesting to determine what topics within …

Assessing Law Students As Reflective Practitioners, Margaret Reuter

Faculty Works

We begin with two premises. One, legal educators, particularly clinical faculty who teach experiential courses, aim for their students to become reflective practitioners. Two, despite the highly personal nature of reflection, law faculty can assess law students’ ability to reflect meaningfully by reviewing and evaluating their reflective journals and essays. This is a story about the three authors of this essay: the genesis of our teaching techniques in reflective practice; how we discovered our similar approaches to assessing reflective practice; and how we have embarked on a project to discover whether a rubric we developed collectively can become the basis …

Measuring Scholarly Impact: A Guide For Law School Administrators And Legal Scholars, Gary M. Lucas Jr

Faculty Scholarship

The author intends for this Essay to serve as a guide for law deans and legal scholars interested in measuring the impact of legal scholarship. In addition, university administrators should find it helpful for comparing the impact of their own law faculty’s scholarship with the scholarship of law faculties at other universities. The primary obstacle to such comparisons is a dearth of publicly available information. To that end, the Essay recommends that each law school create a Google Scholar profile for its faculty and explains the procedures for doing so. By acting on this recommendation, administrators would dramatically improve our …

Implementing A First-Year Research Assessment, Savanna L. Nolan

All Faculty Scholarship

University of Baltimore Law librarians do not have a formal role in teaching legal research, but are frequent guest lecturers and recognized research experts. As such, we volunteered to administer UB's first summative assessment in accordance with the recent implementation of ABA Standard 314. This poster shows the steps taken to design, execute, and grade this legal research assessment, as well as how we reported the results to stakeholders.

The assessment had an objective true/false and multiple-choice section, and a subjective essay question. The librarians selected objective questions considering the core legal research competencies identified by RIPS-SIS following the MacCrate …

An Active Learning Approach To Teaching Tough Topics: Personal Jurisdiction As An Example, Cynthia M. Ho

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Outcomes In The Balance: The Crisis In Legal Education As Catalyst For Change, Beau Steenken

Law Faculty Popular Media

In this article, the author discusses how changes in the legal education market can force legal research teachers to focus their energies on meaningful assessment.

Research Analysis And Planning: The Undervalued Skill In Legal Research Instruction, Robert M. Linz

Publications

This article describes a method of research analysis and planning for legal problems. It introduces the framework of research plan, log, and product and provides a detailed research plan and log that students can use as a template for learning research. The article suggests how to teach the method in legal research classes, shares some of the author's experiences in teaching the method, and addresses some possible criticisms of this approach.

Embedding Assessment Principles In Externships, Kelly S. Terry

Faculty Scholarship

Externships have become an increasingly important component of legal education, as law schools seek to increase experiential learning opportunities for students to gain practice skills prior to entering the profession. As externship courses grow and become an integral part of the law school curriculum, externship teachers should implement best practices for assessing their students' learning, including setting learning outcomes for their courses, selecting assessment tools, gathering and analyzing assessment data, and using assessment data to make course adjustments that will improve student learning. This Article provides a primer on the process of course-level assessment and then explains how to apply …

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 …

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 …

Outcomes & Assessment: A Golden Opportunity For Lrw Professors, David I.C. Thomson

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The American Bar Association is currently discussing drafts of a proposal to shift the law school accreditation standards from inputs measurements (such as numbers of books, faculty student ratios, etc.) to outcomes assessment. While still in discussion, this shift has the potential to create profound change in legal education. For the first time, law schools may be held accountable – beyond the bar exam – for what and how they teach their students. Law schools all across the country are busy trying to determine what this will mean, and how to go about meeting the new ABA standard.

Simulations In Clinics, Contract Drafting, And Upper-Level Courses, Carole O. Heyward, David M. Epstein, Helen S. Scott, Daniel B. Bogart

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

I teach in a transactional clinic called the Urban Development Law Clinic. In my Clinic, we represent non-profit tax-exempt organizations that engage in real estate, economic, and community development. Some of our clients include Greater Cleveland Habitat for Humanity and Karamu House, which is a theater and community arts center. We serve as general counsel for some clients and provide legal advice on an as needed basis for others. The Clinic provides legal advice on real estate matters, corporate governance, transactions, and tax issues. The complexity of matters that we handle ranges from drafting a code of regulations to representing …

Legal Research Assessment, Simon Canick

Faculty Scholarship

Legal research instructors seek to provide their students with a working knowledge of important research tools, strategies with which to develop a rational research plan, and the skill to conduct research efficiently, among other things. A well-conceived legal research class may utilize short-answer assignments, quizzes, and scavenger hunt exercises as a means to establish a baseline of knowledge with critical sources; a series of research problems, with grading based upon students' ability to describe a coherent and logical progression; and a pathfinder or process-oriented final exam, all depending on the instructor's goals. Ultimately, the variety of available assessment tools suggests …

Justice Education And The Evaluation Process: Crossing Borders, Margaret Martin Barry, Martin Geer, Catherine F. Klein, Ved Kumari

Scholarly Articles

If social justice is a teaching goal, how do we effectively assess it? An analysis of a multi-cultural teaching workshop and lessons learned and unanswered.

Justice Education And The Evaluation Process: Crossing Borders, Martin A. Geer, Margaret Martin Barry, Catherine F. Klein, Ved Kumari

Scholarly Works

If social justice is a teaching goal, how do we effectively assess it? An analysis of a multi-cultural teaching workshop and lessons learned and unanswered.

Describing The Ball: Improve Teaching By Using Rubrics - Explicit Grading Criteria, Sophie M. Sparrow

Law Faculty Scholarship

Assessment is crucial to effective teaching and learning. Carnegie's Educating Lawyers and Roy Stuckey's Best Practices for Legal Education emphasize the importance of assessment. This article explains how detailed, written grading criteria describing what students should learn and how they will be evaluated should be a central part of law teachers' assessment plans. The article details how rubrics can improve law student learning, and contains both detailed, step-by-step directions on creating rubrics and examples of rubrics from many different law school courses.

Teacher, Coach, Cheerleader, And Judge: Promoting Learning Through Learner-Centered Assessment, Kristin B. Gerdy

Faculty Scholarship

The author explores the importance of learner-centered assessment and feedback in legal research instruction, and encourages legal research teachers to assist their students' quest to acquire practical legal research abilities by transitioning into the roles of coach, cheerleader, and judge.

Herding Cats: Improving Law School Teaching, Mitchell M. Simon, M. E. Occhialino, Robert L. Fried

Law Faculty Scholarship

What makes a good law teacher? Is excellence in teaching largely a matter of intellectual brilliance, of superior organization and delivery of material, of friendliness and fairness to one's students? Or does it have more to do with style, with stage presence, with the ability to engage an audience in the act of reflective and spontaneous thinking?

While the question of how to define and evaluate teaching necessarily bedevils deans and tenure committees who must make personnel decisions, the focus on defining the competent teacher has obscured from faculty attention the more fundamental question: how can we implement a system …

Teaching Law Students Through Individual Learning Styles, Robin A. Boyle, Rita Dunn

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Teaching can be rewarding, but it can also be frustrating when some students fail to grasp the material. Professor Robin A. Boyle of St. John’s University School of Law has been teaching Legal Research and Writing in small sections of approximately twenty to thirty students for four years. She, like many of her similarly exasperated colleagues, has repeated the same course content by using either lecture or collaborative learning, and has observed some students doing well, whereas others continued to perform poorly. Then, Dr. Rita Dunn was introduced to the law school faculty and suggested that law professors incorporate …

Power And The Morality Of Grading - A Case Study And A Few Critical Thoughts On Grade Normalization, Deborah Waire Post

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.