Stratman secures funding for law student tests
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Professor James Stratman, director of the Technical Communication Program, has enjoyed continued success in securing external funding support for his research investigating the case reading and case reasoning skills of law students. On top of a funding award ($20,000) that he and his colleagues received in July 2005 from the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC), he and his colleagues also received an additional award of $40,000 in October 2005, again from LSAC.
The immediate goal of the research is to develop and validate two different versions of a multiple choice test that would help assess law students’ developing ability to read legal cases critically in relation to specific advocacy objectives on behalf of a client. Each test is based upon a different set of three related legal cases, which students must read and consult as part of the test itself.
“A common problem with law school instruction is that, week after week in their classes, students must read cases largely in order to memorize the ‘rule’ or ‘principle’ that each one stands for,” Stratman explains. “But in actual litigation practice and when conducting legal research for their clients, lawyers must be very good at critically evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of a case as applied to given legal controversy. They must learn to read very closely and carefully, and to reason both deductively and analogically from one case to another.
“These skills, unfortunately, are still mainly learned by immersion, which is very inefficient, and not through explicit procedures,” he says. “The tests we are developing and field testing are based upon a four-stage model of skill acquisition, so that test results will help show what particular case reading and reasoning skills students have mastered and which ones they may need more support in learning.”
The longer-term goal of the research is to use the tests to help investigate which approaches to teaching case reading and case reasoning currently pursued by law schools are most beneficial for their students. As Stratman further notes, “New law students have always found the legal discourse contained in cases to be very intimidating. Yet, even in their first weeks, law students are expected to already understand how these very complex texts work, and how to take them apart. At the same time, the heavy pressure to memorize what a large number cases ‘mean’ (so as to perform well on end-of-term exams) often prevents students from acquiring the critical and analytical abilities that law faculty expect them to acquire. We see our test development and field research as helping to address this issue.”
The latest award will enable Stratman and his two research colleagues—Professor Dorothy Evensen of Penn State University’s School of Education, and Professor Laurel Oates of the University of Seattle Law School—to gather test data from both first and third year law students at five different law schools across the United States during the spring and fall semesters of 2006.