Steel, Alex; Laurens, Julian; Huggins, Anna --- "Class Participation as a Learning and Assessment Strategy in Law: Facilitating Students’ Engagement, Skills Development and Deep Learning" [2013] UNSWLRS 49

Last Updated: 16 August 2013

Class Participation as a Learning and Assessment Strategy in Law: Facilitating Students’ Engagement, Skills Development and Deep Learning

Alex Steel, University of New South Wales
Julian Laurens, University of New South Wales
Anna Huggins, University of New South Wales

This paper is available for download at Available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2289093

Citation

This paper is to be published in University of New South Wales Law Journal, Vol.36, No.1. 2013. This paper may also be referenced as [2013] UNSWLRS 49.

Abstract

Well designed assessment can be a vehicle for encouraging students to learn and engage more broadly than with the minimums required to complete the assessment activity. In that sense assessment need not merely ‘drive’ earning, but can instead act as a catalyst for further learning beyond what a student had anticipated.

In this article we reconsider the potential roles and benefits in legal education of a form of interactive classroom learning we term assessable class participation (ACP), both as part of a pedagogy grounded in assessment and learning theory, and as a platform for developing broader autonomous approaches to learning amongst students. ACP can also be a significant contributor to developing and assuring graduate outcomes that go beyond content mastery.

We consider some of the barriers students can face in ACP and the ways in which teacher approaches to ACP can positively affect the socio-emotional climates in classrooms and thus reduce those barriers. We argue that the way in which a teacher facilitates ACP is critical to the ability to develop positive emotional and learning outcomes for law students, and for teachers themselves.