Skip to main content

Elaborative Interrogation in the Legal Research Classroom

One type of activity legal skills professors can incorporate into their classrooms is elaboration. As described by Yana Weinstein and Megan Sumeracki in Understanding How We Learn: A Visual Guide, "[e]laboration describes the process of adding features to one's memories."[1]  It helps with organization of information within the knowledge structures in one's minds, making it easier to retrieve this information later. But what activities will help students to add features to their memories?

Weinstein and Sumeracki recommend three elaboration techniques that can all be applied to the legal research classroom: elaborative interrogation, concrete examples, and dual coding.[2] Studies of each has shown improvement in student learning and long-term retention. Today, we're going to look specifically elaborative interrogation.

With elaborative interrogation, students ask themselves questions about the reason and way things work.[3]  While it's easy to presume law students are doing this sort of analytical thinking when engaging in research skills, given the transfer of knowledge and long-term retention problems that plague law students' research skills, it's obviously not happening for all students. With simple prompting of our students, it could.

The basic structure of the elaborative interrogation technique is to ask a series of questions that will allow your students to explain the main ideas and make connections between major concepts. One study on elaborative interrogation showed that the "quality of the answer mattered," with students performing "best when they produced an adequate response to the question;" however, a poor answer was still better for learning than no response.[4] It's also important to note that elaborative interrogation is best used when students are familiar with a topic, rather than when a topic is originally introduced.[5]

Self-explanation is a subset of elaborative interrogation, in which students explain their problem-solving steps aloud while they work on a problem.[6]  In a 1994 study, one group of students were given prompts to self-explain as they worked through a group of problems, while another group was left to solve problems as they usually did. The group prompted to self-explain performed significantly better when tested on their understanding of the concepts.[7]

Self-explanation may work particularly well for legal problem-solving. Because legal research is a process, with various methods and strategies that can lead to answers, having students explain their process out loud is a great way to help them retain strategies that work well in certain situations. It may also help them to discern which strategy may work best when faced with research problems in the future--helping to fix the transfer of knowledge problem.

Legal research instructors can have students complete a research problem while explaining their choices as they walk through the problem. This might work particularly well in a legal research conference, where the instructor can ask questions that help the students make helpful connections between new learning and prior learning on an individual basis. While this will undoubtedly take a significant amount of time, it will only serve to boost the beneficial nature of research conferencing

It's critical that the self-explanations are happening aloud, not just in students' minds, so we know they are actually engaging in self-explanation. This could make self-explanation more challenging to do in-class if you want to directly supervise all students, but you could try having students explain their reasoning to one another. James Lang gives a number of easy-to-implement self-explanation activities in his excellent Small Teaching. It can be as simple as asking students to answer the question "Why are you doing that?"[8]

Self-explanation should help students recall steps to take when they are using similar research strategies in the future, as well as help students relate previously-learned skills with new skills, particularly important for legal research's circular and flexible nature. It also helps students to recognize when they are confused about a step in the process--talking aloud helps them recognize their lack of understanding. I'll be doing a lot more asking "Why?" to my students this fall; it may freak them out at first, but I think it'll ultimately result in them thoughtfully considering their research choices, determining for themselves why certain strategies work best in particular situations, and help them to select good strategies when they encounter future problems.




[1] Yana Weinstein & Megan Sumeracki with Oliver Caviglioli, Understanding How We Learn: A Visual Guide 102 (2019).

[2] Id. at 104.

[3] Id. at 105.

[4] Id. at 106.

[5] Id.

[6] Id. at 107.

[7] Id.

[8] James Lang, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning 137-165 (2016).

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...

Motivation in the Legal Research Classroom

Motivating students in the legal research classroom can be a challenge. As we know, there are many false narratives surrounding students' conceptions of legal research's importance, interest level, and ease, all of which can result in a decrease in students' motivation to engage in this subject matter. There are two types of motivation--intrinsic and extrinsic.  Extrinsic motivation occurs when students are motivated by an outside reward or punishment;[1] in instruction, this is often the grades students will get on research assignments or the participation points they might receive for actively engaging with in-class exercises.  Intrinsic motivation , on the other hand, occurs when students are interested in the topic for its own sake.[2] Due to legal research's false narratives, students entering our classrooms tend to be drive primarily by extrinsic motivation.  The problem is, as Julie Dirksen aptly notes in her excellent book Design for How People Learn , ...

Cognitive Disruptors in Legal Education

The pandemic has had a significant impact on all of our lives (biggest understatement ever).  However, with the return to in-person learning at many institutions, there has been this feeling that we should have returned to our "normal" teaching strategies in an effort to get back to the way things were. But of course, we know that things are not the same.  People traumatized by the pandemic--loved ones being gravely ill and dying, extreme isolation, financial stressors due to industries being impacted, and more--are experiencing lingering effects of the past two years.  Burnout has become the buzz word, as entire circles of friends and colleagues report feeling emotionally, physically, and mentally exhausted. This means that our classrooms should not go back to normal.  We must consider what might be impacting our students' ability to attend to and retain new information presented in our classrooms.  I've written before about cognitive (over)load and the limits...

Rethinking Formative Assessment

We've seen an increased significance placed on formative assessment in the legal academy. Standard 314 of the ABA Standards requires that law schools use both formative and summative assessment methods in their curriculum. Its rational for doing so is "to measure and improve student learning and provide meaningful feedback to students." The ABA defines formative assessment methods as "measurements at different points during a particular course or at different points over the span of a student's education that provide meaningful feedback to improve student learning." Those of us in the legal research instruction business are no strangers to formative assessment. We are leaders in this in the law school curriculum, with rarely a class going by in which students do not practice their skills. Lately, though, I've been wondering whether I'm going about formative assessment in the way that will best provide meaningful feedback to students. In the mandato...