Guyer: Experiential Learning: Context and Connections for Legal Research – A Case Study

Cindy Guyer, JD, MLIS, of University of Southern California School of Law has posted Experiential Learning: Context and Connections for Legal Research – A Case Study (2012).

Here is the abstract:

The American Bar Association requires that all law students receive “substantial instruction” in legal research. This article discusses a unique legal research program that meets this requirement by focusing on experiential learning. Two components of experiential learning, context and connections, are explained pedagogically and specifically as to legal research curriculum.

Callister on Bloom’s Taxonomy as a Hierarchy and Means for Teaching Legal Research Skills

Professor Paul D. Callister of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law has published Time to Blossom: An Inquiry into Bloom’s Taxonomy as a Hierarchy and Means for Teaching Legal Research Skills, 102 Law Library Journal No. 2, pages 191-219 (2010). Here is the abstract:

Pedagogy requires both a theory and a consistent method of implementation. While the literature of law librarianship abounds in suggestions and descriptions about how legal research is being taught, it lacks sufficient consideration of pedagogical theory from the field of education. In light of the Carnegie Report, and efforts at comprehensive curriculum reform, the time is ripe for law librarianship to develop a comprehensive and properly grounded pedagogy for legal research instruction. This paper proposes and illustrates adapting Bloom’s Taxonomy as a means to identify legal research skills, prioritize objectives, and organize course curricula.

HT Susan Nevelov Mart.

2010 Boulder Summer Conference on Legal Information: Teaching & Scholarship

[NOTE: Updated on 15 February 2010 to link directly to the call for papers and to specify the topics.]

The Second Boulder Summer Conference on Legal Information: Teaching and Scholarship, will be held 8-10 July 2010, at the University of Colorado School of Law, in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

A call for papers for the conference, with submission deadline of 19 March 2010, was distributed on the American Association of Law Libraries’ Academic Law Libraries Special Interest Section (AALL ALL-SIS) listserv (restricted to AALL ALL-SIS members) on 27 January 2010.

Papers are invited on “any aspect of legal information, with preference given to papers dealing with legal information literacy.”

Valentine on Legal Research as a Fundamental Skill

Professor Sarah Valentine of City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law has published Legal Research as a Fundamental Skill: A Lifeboat for Students and Law Schools, 39 University of Baltimore Law Review 175 (2009). Here is the abstract:

“This article argues that current legal research education is dangerously deficient and demonstrates how it can be reconceptualized to become a synergistic first year course that supports the learning of doctrine and legal analysis, as well as necessary research skills in accordance with recent suggestions by the ABA, the authors of the Carnegie Report, and other legal commentators.

“Most law schools provide legal research instruction that is not only ineffective in teaching basic research skills but is potentially hazardous to students attempting to learn legal analysis. The ability to electronically search and access law has created a paradigm shift that has affected the very framework of the law as it has been understood and taught for the past one hundred and thirty years. The very act of accessing the law electronically restructures the law itself. It erodes the idea that one can learn the law from the scientific study of readily agreed upon precedent. As the historical understanding of law shifts, the ability to teach students to ‘think like lawyers’ using the structured concepts of the legal system developed in the 1880s, but still relied on by law professors today, begins to collapse.

“Creating an excellent legal research course is not necessarily difficult. It requires that legal research be taught as both a fundamental legal skill, requiring analysis and doctrinal knowledge and as a fundamental lawyering skill, integrated into the entire first year curriculum, not merely linked to legal writing. In addition, it must teach information literacy skills and the teaching should be informed with adult learning methodologies. Such a course provides students not only with the necessary research skills for law practice, but assists them in building the conceptual framework necessary for legal analysis.”

Call for Proposals: Institute for Law Teaching and Learning 2010

A call for proposals, with submission deadline of February 12, 2010, has been issued for The Institute for Law Teaching and Learning 2010, “Teaching Law Practice Across the Curriculum,” to be held June 16-18, 2010 at Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, Kansas, USA. Here is a description of the topics to be addressed, which appear to include a number of legal informatics topics:

“The Institute invites proposals for 75-minute workshops consistent with a broad interpretation of the conference theme, ‘Teaching Law Practice Across the Curriculum.’ The workshops can address teaching and learning in first-year courses, upper-level courses, clinical courses, writing courses, and academic support. The workshops can deal with innovative materials, alternative teaching methods, ways to enhance student learning, formative feedback to students, evaluation of student performance, etc. Each workshop should include materials that participants can use during the workshop and when they return to their campuses. Presenters should not read papers, but should model effective teaching methods by actively engaging the participants. The co-directors would be glad to work with anyone who would like advice in designing their presentations to be interactive.”

For more information, please see the call for proposals.

Callister on Bloom’s Taxonomy as a Means to Ordered Legal Research Skills

Professor Paul D. Callister of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, has posted on SSRN the abstract of his new article, entitled Time to Blossom: An Inquiry into Bloom’s Taxonomy as a Means to Ordered Legal Research Skills. Here is the abstract:

“Within law librarianship and legal education, there has been far too little scholarly engagement on the underlying pedagogy at the heart of legal research instruction. To correct this deficiency, law librarianship needs to open a dialogue and should consider adapting Bloom’s Taxonomy as a common schema for a collaborative effort.

“This paper was initially presented at the ‘Conference on Legal Information: Scholarship and Teaching,’ held at the University of Colorado Law School on June 21-22, 2009, as part of its Boulder Summer Conference Series. It follows the author’s own recently published challenge to law librarianship and legal research instructors to create a Bloom’s taxonomy for legal research education. See Paul D. Callister, Thinking Like a Research Expert: Schemata for Teaching Complex Problem-Solving Skills, 28 LEGAL REFERENCE SERVICES Q. 31, 48-49 (2009).”

Legal Research Instruction: Recent Developments

[NOTE: Updated on 24 October 2009 to link to the abstract of Professor Callister's new article, Time to Blossom: An Inquiry into Bloom’s Taxonomy as a Means to Ordered Legal Research Skills. Updated on 24 September 2009 to link to the ABA Student Learning Outcomes Subcommittee's September 3, 2009 draft of the revised 300 Standards. Updated on 22 September 2009 to link to Fred Dingledy's Findings from a Survey of Law School Legal Research Programs. Updated on 8 September 2009 to include citations to recent articles on law student learning styles.]

This blog will occasionally comment on legal research instruction, because such instruction is an important form of education respecting legal information processing. 2009 has seen a number of interesting developments in legal research education in the U.S.:

1. Special Issue of Legal Reference Services Quarterly

Professor Barbara Bintliff of the University of Colorado Law School and Associate Dean Duncan Alford of the University of South Carolina School of Law have co-edited a two-part special issue (Part I here and Part II here) of Legal Reference Services Quarterly devoted to Teaching Legal Research. The articles in those issues discuss a very wide range of topics respecting legal research education, and aggregate a great deal of useful and current research.

2. Boulder Statement and Boulder Conference

Professor Bintliff led the drafting this summer of the Boulder Statement on Legal Research Education. The statement describes the objectives of legal research instruction in terms consistent with the legal education reform framework expressed in William Sullivan et al., Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Practice of Law (2007) (commonly known as The Carnegie Report and summarized here) and Roy Stuckey et al., Best Practices for Legal Education (2007) (commonly known as The Stuckey Report). The statement was drafted during a discussion among law library directors, law librarians, and legal research educators about legal research pedagogy, held at a Conference on Legal Information: Scholarship and Teaching, organized by Professor Bintliff, and held at the University of Colorado Law School on June 21-22, 2009, as part of its Boulder Summer Conference Series. Professor Bintliff will convene a second Boulder Summer Conference on Legal Information on July 9-10, 2010, which will include discussion of legal research pedagogy and ways to implement the Boulder Statement. A call for papers respecting the second Boulder conference will be issued in early 2010.

3. Testing Legal Research Skills on U.S. Bar Examinations

Inclusion of legal research testing in U.S. bar examinations seems more likely. At the July 26, 2009 American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Annual Meeting program entitled Legal Research Questions on the Bar Exam: Preparing Our Students [available as Webcast; registration required] organized by Associate Law Librarian Mary Ann Neary of the Boston College Law Library, Erica Moeser, President of the National Conference of Bar Examiners stated that legal research questions were likely to be included in a component of the U.S. bar examination within “three to five year[s].” That program also featured interesting descriptions by law library directors and law librarians respecting their current legal research instruction courses and how well those courses are suited to preparing law students for testing of legal research skills on the bar examination. In addition, several articles in Part II of the Legal Reference Services Quarterly special issue discuss bar examination testing of legal research skills, and a number of additional resources on this topic are listed in the handout to the AALL program (included in the complete conference handout package, available for a fee).

4. Legal Information Literacy

A number of recent developments involve legal information literacy:

• The AALL Academic Law Libraries Special Interest Section Student Services Committee has developed a Sample Survey of Law Student Research Habits and Skills. This survey tests law students’ legal information literacy and legal research skills at four points in the course of their law school experience: at the start of law school, after completing the first year legal research course, after law-related summer employment, and in their final semester or quarter of law school.
• AALL has convened a Joint Committee on Articulating Law Student Information Literacy. According to an announcement published on the 2009 AALL Annual Meeting blog, the members of this committee “will work together towards developing a set of [information literacy] standards oriented toward measuring the research skills and abilities of law students.”
• Molly (Mary) Brownfield, Reference Librarian at the Duke University Goodson Law Library and Dennis C. Kim-Prieto, Reference Librarian at the Rutgers University (Newark) Law Library, presented a program at the 2009 AALL Annual Meeting entitled What We Learned from Our SAILS: Using Law Students as Human Subjects and Measuring Law Student Information Literacy (audio available, registration required, and a fee may apply). A summary of the program appears here. The program discusses the results of the presenters’ research on whether an information literacy assessment instrument called SAILS (Standardized Assessment for Information Literacy Skills) developed for use in undergraduate libraries, was suited to assessing legal information literacy skills of law students. The presenters’ research involving students at the Rutgers Newark School of Law indicated that the SAILS instrument is not well suited to assessing law students’ legal information literacy skills. A bibliography and other resources on this topic are listed in the handout to the program (included in the complete conference handout package, available for a fee).

5. ABA Standards Revision

The American Bar Association (ABA) Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar Standards Review Committee is conducting a review of the ABA Standards for Approval of Law Schools. “[S]ubstantial instruction” in legal research is required by current standard 302(a)(2), and may be addressed in a revised version of the standards. The ABA Student Learning Outcomes Subcommittee’s September 3, 2009 draft of the revised 300 Standards is available here. (HT Vice President Rensberger.) In July and August 2009 a task force of the AALL Academic Law Libraries Special Interest Section chaired by Professor Kristina Niedringhaus of the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law gathered comments from law librarians respecting possible revisions to the standards.

6. Law School Admission Project Report

An important work of empirical research respecting the value of legal research in legal practice has been released. Professor Marjorie Shultz of Boalt Hall very graciously agreed to permit the posting of a 2003 report, entitled Phase I Final Report: Identification and Development of Predictors for Successful Lawyering, that explains the methodology used to determine the attributes of successful lawyers, called “effectiveness factors,” identified in The Law School Admission Project: Looking Beyond the LSAT. That project seeks to develop a new law school admissions examination designed to predict attributes associated with successful performance as a lawyer. “Researching the Law” is one of these “effectiveness factors.” The report also summarizes previous empirical research identifying the possession of legal research skills as an attribute necessary for effective performance as a lawyer. More information on this report is available here.

7. Law Student Learning Styles

Finally, t Two articles published in the Spring 2009 issue of Perspectives: Teaching Legal Research and Writing discuss new evidence respecting law students’ learning styles. This evidence may suggest ways in which legal research instructional methods might be altered to accord better with law students’ preferred modes of learning.

• In Law Students Are Different from the General Population: Empirical Findings Regarding Learning Styles, Professor Robin Boyle Laisure, Director of Academic Support, and Assistant Director of the Writing Center at St. John’s University School of Law; Professor Jeffrey J. Minneti, Director of Academic Success at Stetson University College of Law; and Professor Andrea Honigsfeld of Molloy College report results of a study comparing the learning styles of law students at St. John’s and Stetson with those of “a random sample of 95 students from college and graduate schools around the United States.” The results “showed that the learning styles of the students in the law schools differed significantly from those in the college and graduate schools for 14 different elements of the 26 elements studied.” The authors summarized their findings as follows: “[A]s compared with those in the General Student Population, the law students more strongly assessed themselves as Verbal Kinesthetic, Analytic, experiencing higher energy levels in the Late Afternoon/Evening, Single-Task preferenced (as opposed to multitasking), less likely to learn in Small Groups or Teams than Independently, and preferring Routines and Patterns.”
• In Teaching Every Student: A Demonstration Lesson That Adapts Instruction to Students’ Learning Styles, Professor Minneti and Professor Catherine J. Cameron of Stetson Law demonstrate how such empirical evidence about law student learning styles might be used to improve legal research instruction. In their article, Professors Minneti and Cameron describe a demonstration legal research and writing lesson designed to accord with the learning styles of their students as determined through the Building Excellence Learning Styles Survey. The authors also report the detailed results of that survey for the 2008 Stetson Law incoming class.

8. Fred Dingledy’s Survey of Law School Legal Research Programs

Fred Dingledy, Reference Librarian at the College of William & Mary Law Library, has published the results of an informal survey of academic law libraries respecting their law schools’ legal research instructional programs. Ten libraries responded, and the results are full of detail and difficult to summarize. Readers are encouraged to examine Mr. Dingledy’s prose description of the results as well as the table providing complete results.

9. Professor Paul Callister’s Article on Bloom’s Taxonomy as Applied to the Pedagogy of Legal Research Instruction

Professor Paul D. Callister of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, has posted on SSRN the abstract of his new article, entitled Time to Blossom: An Inquiry into Bloom’s Taxonomy as a Means to Ordered Legal Research Skills. Here is the abstract:

“Within law librarianship and legal education, there has been far too little scholarly engagement on the underlying pedagogy at the heart of legal research instruction. To correct this deficiency, law librarianship needs to open a dialogue and should consider adapting Bloom’s Taxonomy as a common schema for a collaborative effort.

“This paper was initially presented at the ‘Conference on Legal Information: Scholarship and Teaching,’ held at the University of Colorado Law School on June 21-22, 2009, as part of its Boulder Summer Conference Series. It follows the author’s own recently published challenge to law librarianship and legal research instructors to create a Bloom’s taxonomy for legal research education. See Paul D. Callister, Thinking Like a Research Expert: Schemata for Teaching Complex Problem-Solving Skills, 28 LEGAL REFERENCE SERVICES Q. 31, 48-49 (2009).”

Legal Information: Scholarship and Teaching: Conference

[Updated 6-24-2009 to remove link to conference papers page, which is no longer available, and to add comments on the conference and thanks to Professor Barbara Bintliff. Updated on 6-20-2009 to clarify the nature of the social networks topic.]

This weekend I’ll be attending a conference entitled Legal Information: Scholarship and Teaching, held at the University of Colorado at Boulder, School of Law, June 21-22, 2009. Conference papers are available here. [The conference papers are no longer available.] Topics include:

• the information behavior of lawyers and law professors;
• legal research instruction;
• law library directors’ roles in legal education reform generally and in skills-based instruction particularly;
• libraries and freedom of expression;
• social networks hosted by academic institutions law schools;
• automated versus human indexing of case law;
• the role of digests in case law research; and
• the definition of “legal information.”

In my view, this was a very fine workshop conference, enabling all of the presenters to receive valuable feedback on their papers, and fostering a lively and interesting discussion of legal research pedagogy. Many thanks to Professor Barbara Bintliff for organizing and hosting the conference.