Legal Research Pedagogy

I hear from a number of my fellow law librarians that they don't like doing research conferences with their students. The number one reason I hear for why is that they take up a tremendous amount of time--which is completely fair, given time is a commodity most law librarians are short on. For me, the benefits of research conferences far outweigh the time needed to perform them. Here are just a few reasons why I include them in my research courses: 1.  As I've already noted elsewhere , they are a great way for instructors to model for their students how to collaborate and communicate in a way similar to what they'll do in practice. Conferencing is a lawyering skill that students need to practice during their legal education. 2.  Individualized feedback is critical to student learning (and it's required under the ABA Standards for experiential simulation courses ).  Research conferences allow us to provide feedback in an atmosphere that all but guarantees that our ...

Studies show that humans forget most of what they learn. But, students acquire new knowledge better when we keep a couple of things in mind: 1)        Students learn better when they have a clear understanding of why they are being expected to learn new tasks and information . As such, it is critical that we explain to students why we are teaching what we’re teaching. Tying curriculum back to practical application can help students understand the importance of what they are learning.  For those of us teaching legal research, this is vitally important. We have to tell students why being strong researchers is central to their ability to be efficient lawyers—that they will be spending approximately 35% of their time conducting legal research in their first few years of practice. We have to explain to them that research is an analytical skill that they must practice in context so they can learn to do this critical lawyering skill effectively. It’s also impo...

The research and analysis that we teach our students are processes, but when our students’ grades are based primarily on the documents they produce, students can have a difficult time internalizing those processes. This is partially due to what cognitive psychologists refer to as cognitive load.   Cognitive psychologists define cognitive load as “the mental burden that managing working memory imposes on a person.” [1]   According to a 2015 law review article on cognitive load and legal writing: "Cognitive load theorists opine that the process of learning complex new information can exhaust a student’s finite working memory, perhaps capable of holding as few as two or three elements at a time. The complexity of the ‘element interactivity’—the interaction between various elements of the material to be learned—alters cognitive load. Thus, the complicated process of analyzing legal problems, researching their possible solutions, and communicating that analysis in writing c...

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...

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...

For decades, those discussing best practices in legal education have highlighted the importance of skills education (see the Crampton Report, the MacCrate Report, the Carnegie Report, and Best Practices for Legal Education, for just a few examples). But, as legal writing, advocacy, and clinical courses have all emerged to take their rightful place as key components in law students' education, legal research has remained a shadow skill. Despite numerous reports from those hiring our students being dissatisfied with their research skills, legal research education remains relegated to the background even in first year skills classes with "legal research" in their very title. At least in part, this is due to legal research having been divorced from the analysis that is central to the Langdellian model of legal education. In reality, analysis is central to successful research, and it is only by reclaiming research as an analytical skill in the modern legal academy that resea...