Skip to main content

Rethinking Learning Outcomes in Legal Research Courses

Learning outcomes have obvious value to our institutions.  ABA Standard 301 requires that law schools "establish and publish learning outcomes" that are designed to prepare students for "effective, ethical, and responsible participation" in the legal profession.  Usually, individual course outcomes should then align with these school-wide learning outcomes.  We include these learning outcomes in our syllabi to show our compliance with the ABA standards in our accreditation visits.  But learning objectives can, or at least should, also have a pedagogical benefit.  After all, we are including them in our syllabi for a reason--to give our students an idea of the learning experience they are about to have in the course. They should also give students a clear picture of what they should be taking with them from the course into the actual practice of law.

As Edmund J. Hansen writes in Idea-Based Learning: A Course Design Process to Promote Conceptual Understanding, the way many instructors are writing the objectives they're including in their syllabi might be failing in this regard: "[T]he narrow focus of behavioral objectives with action words suggesting small performance tasks does not always capture enough of what we want students to learn about a subject matter." [1]  Add this to the fact that learning outcomes are packed into syllabi with other humdrum information like course procedures and weekly topics that don't seem to relate directly to those learning objectives, and students are unlikely to recall a single course learning objective later in the semester, much less later in their career.  Instead, learning outcomes should focus less on concrete actions and more "in favor of abilities students gain and maintain for the rest of their lives." [2]

Hansen recommends that instructors, in designing learning outcomes, look first to the big ideas that characterize their discipline, selecting two or three in which to ground their course. [3]  So what are these big ideas in legal research courses?  Legal research syllabi tend to focus on concrete bibliographic skills, likely because the school-wide learning outcomes, while generally identifying legal research as one of the broad areas to be included in the learning outcomes, tend to focus on skills like employing primary and secondary sources appropriately and using proper citation. In these school-wide learning outcomes, legal reasoning or analysis and problem-solving are usually found in a separate learning outcome, divorced from legal research.  The word "analysis," a critical component to effective legal research, tends to be missing in the research-related learning outcomes, other than implicitly being included in the ability to create and implement a research plan.  Likely, you'll find aspects related to research in most, if not all, of the school's designated learning outcome areas: legal analysis and problem-solving, professional skills like working in a team, professional ethics; oral and written communication; etc. 

To my mind, the role of analysis in legal research ought to be one of the big ideas in which we ground our research courses.  Reclaiming analysis when we're writing our learning outcomes for research courses is of critical importance, both for librarians' place as educators in the legal academy, but more importantly to help our student understand the importance of analytical thinking in legal research.  One of the key ideas they should take with them after their legal research courses is that research is not simply a rote, mechanical task.  In order to do so, we must look beyond our institutions' research-centric learning outcomes when selecting learning outcomes for our individual courses and emphasize the analysis and problem-solving inherent to legal research.  Then, once we've identified these learning outcomes and included them in our syllabus, we need to go return to them again and again throughout the semester, pointing out the times when our students are engaging in analysis.



[1] Edmund J. Hansen, Idea-Based Learning: A Course Design Process to Promote Conceptual Understanding 29 (2011).

[2] Id.

[3] Id. at 35-36.

Popular posts from this blog

Why Experts Can Struggle to Teach Novices

This week in our Slack group on teaching , there was an interesting discussion about expertise and the amount of time needed to prep for instruction. I mentioned something that I recalled reading: that experts can be less effective in teaching novices because often the expert skips cognitive steps that the novice learner needs to understand.  I thought I'd dig into this a little more today on the blog. The fact is novices and experts learn very differently.  The major reason for this is that experts not only know a lot about their chosen discipline, but they understand how that discipline is organized. As such, what has a clear structure to the expert is a jumbled set of unorganized information to the novice.  The information presented to novices "are more or less random data points."[1]  In contrast, when the expert learns something new in her area of expertise, she just plugs it into the knowledge structure that already exists in her long-term memory. Because the...

Helping With Student Focus & Motivation in the Remote Classroom, Part 3: Limiting New Technologies to Reduce Extrinsic Cognitive Load

A librarian colleague used to say to me, "Technology is great until it's not." This couldn't be more true in the classroom.  As many of us prepare for a fall entirely or partially online, there's a rush to familiarize ourselves with lots of new educational technology to teach our classes. There's this sense that if you're not using the best and newest ed tech in your class, you're doing something wrong. Fortunately, the science doesn't back this up.  Using too many different types of technology can be a contributing factor to cognitive overload in students . Cognitive load is a term cognitive psychologists use to describe the mental challenge that the limitations of working memory puts on a student's learning.[1] Basically, working memory is extremely limited in both time and duration. Humans can only hold on to between four and nine "chunks" of information at any given time,[2] and can only hold on to new information in their worki...

Research Conferences as a Practice Skill

Many first year legal research and writing include a conferencing component. Most of these conferences, however, focus primarily on the writing process. Conferences are held after students have struggled through the research process and have drafted at least some part of a memo or brief. There are many pedagogical reasons for the importance of research conferences (e.g. students are provided with individualized feedback), but one that is often overlooked is that research conferences help prepare students for practice by giving them opportunities to collaborate with other legal professionals and to orally communicate about the legal issues they are facing. Through research conferences, students learn how to discuss the authorities they have located effectively and to communicate how they are relevant to the legal issues they are facing. This practice collaborating is key. As Susan Azyndar noted in her article " Work with Me Here: Collaborative Learning in the Legal Research Class...

The Experiential Simulation Course Checklist, Part 1

When developing courses to meet the requirements for experiential simulation courses, there are three ABA standards that come into play: Standard 303(a)(3), Standard 302, and Standard 304. When combined, there are eight bullet points that one must meet to comply with the standards for experiential simulation courses**: " Primarily experiential in nature " (Standard 303(a)(3)):  To meet this bullet point, an ABA Guidance Memo provides additional help. It notes that the "primarily" suggests "more than simply inserting an experiential component into an existing class." Furthermore, the "primarily" "indicates the main purpose of something." It is clear that the experiential nature of the course should be central to the course's design and should be prevalent across the entire length of the course. In fact, the ABA notes that the "experiential nature of the course should . . . be the organizing principle of the course, and th...

Cultivating Trust in the Classroom

Cultivating trust is one of the keys to effective collaboration. This is especially true in the classroom. The relationship between instructor and student can have a huge effect on how much the student learns. But how do we cultivate trust? Here are just a few ways: 1) Creating " psychological safety ." In a study by Google of what helps teams collaborate well, Google found that psychological safety, as measured by taking turns in discussions and team members demonstrating high degrees of social sensitivity. In the classroom context, this means students need to feel free to ask questions and speak up without fear of rejection by those sharing their classroom space. Instructors can foster this by making it clear that there are no "stupid" questions, by cultivating a supportive classroom atmosphere, and by encouraging students who ask questions or make comments with positive reinforcement. 2) Listening actively . When students feel that instructors and classm...