Track A5 - 'I Came Here to be Taught the Law by You …’ Designing Assessment so Students Want to Find out for Themselves

Dr Maureen Spencer, Middlesex University, School of Law

 

At the start of a very interesting and thought-provoking presentation, Dr Spencer posed a philosophical puzzle called ‘The Flute Game’, originally used by the eminent Professor and Nobel Laureate, Amartya Sen, to illustrate the multi-dimensional idea of justice. There is one flute available and three children with ‘claims’ upon it. Anne says the flute should be given to her because she is the only one who knows how to play it. Bob says the flute should be handed to him as he is so poor he has no toys to play with. Carla says the flute is hers because it is the fruit of her own labour. How do we decide between these three legitimate claims?

A great way to start a debate and one immediately ensued but it was not such a great idea in the view of one of Dr Spencer’s students, whose indignation gave us the title of this session: ‘I came here to be taught the law by you’ (and, by implication, not to take part in pointless philosophical debates).
Of course, what Maureen Spencer was trying to illustrate for her students was the fact that questions of value don’t have just one ‘right’ answer, and learning and assessment should be designed to challenge student conformity and question the ‘answers’.

Dr Spencer suggests that “academic staff should consider adopting more vigorously the Boyer Commission recommendation that inquiry-based learning (IBL) should be our pervasive pedagogical approach”.  At a time when students are treated as consumers of higher education she advocates moving away from those approaches based on the passive exposition of content.

The presentation outlined an innovation whereby delivery and assessment of a third-year Law module, ‘Criminal Evidence’, was transformed from information-based lectures to an emphasis on student inquiry. The pedagogic objectives of this inquiry-based learning (IBL) approach included: learning to learn; research capabilities; analysis; cognitive skills; communication and domain knowledge. As Dr Spencer put it, the main aim of using IBL for this module was to add to the individual’s knowledge base and to develop critical thinking.

Students were given a range of inquiry tasks to pursue and presented their findings, aided by extensive online resources and the core textbook. Assessment was by viva voce and a seen exam. The law exam is traditionally a test of memorising large amounts of information and the seen exam represents a move away from this – reducing some of the enormous stress and moving into the information age, where memorising large tracts is not quite as relevant or necessary as it was.

The approach is a work in progress, and the outcome was only partly successful in this first year of IBL. Dr Spencer reported that on the one hand the oral questioning assessment encouraged the expression of independent thinking but on the other hand there was limited participation in the overseas campus in the weekly blogs. To quote from Dr Spencer’s abstract of this session: “To improve performance more attention needs to be given to involving students in the delivery of the module, for example by making the podcasts multi-voiced including students and staff. Overall the experiment confirmed the potential for IBL to enable students to contribute to constructing rather than simply reflecting the world they will join as professionals.”

'I came here to be taught the law by you...' from mdxaltc

Report by Celia Cozens, e-Learning Content Manager, Centre for Academic Practice Enhancement (CAPE)