A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

Enhancing learning in legal education
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When you have completed this exercise it is probable that the two sets of ticks will not be
identical. It is also probable that you will have fewer ticks in the second set than the first,
and that, in a few instances, your answer was prefaced by a ‘well, it depends . . . ’. What
emerges from doing this exercise?
Some of the key issues that could have been considered are:
• Which kinds of assessments are going to be better at assessing the more complex or
higher cognitive abilities?
• When assessing skills of evaluation, is it students’ capacity to evaluate information
against criteria they have come up with, or just their capacity to remember and apply
someone else’s criteria that is being assessed? The latter involves evidence of a
different (and lesser) cognitive capacity.
• Are conventional assessments good at enabling students to create new knowledge?
If not, is this just a matter of unsophisticated question design, a flaw in the mode of
assessment, or a more fundamental problem in that the curriculum inadvertently
discourages students from being creative and making connections across topic or
subject boundaries?
• To what extent are legal research skills directly assessed rather than inferred from
performance in traditional assessments?
Consequently it is suggested that there are two substantial challenges for law teachers:
(1) to ensure that traditional assessments are well designed and used appropriately in the
light of module and programme learning objectives (this is itself a complex issue – see
e.g. Bone (1999: 17–20) for a brief introduction) and (2) to adopt a range of alternative
assessments that are also appropriately aligned – again a complex issue – to their relevant
learning objectives.
It is also not possible in an overview such as this to look exhaustively at the range of
alternative assessment practices available. Therefore, the remainder of this section will
offer some brief examples of assessment practices, with an example offered in Case study
4, that potentially add variety and breadth to the legal education experience, and could
link with the innovative teaching approaches already discussed.
Case study 4: Assessing teamwork at the Queensland
University of Technology (QUT)
The development of teamworking and group skills has increasingly been
emphasised in UK legal education, first through the benchmarking process, and
latterly, because such skills are highly valued by employers, as part of what is
sometimes called the ‘employability agenda’ for higher education. Moreover, it
is also argued that, independent of any such agenda, group learning has
substantial intellectual benefits. Working together, students develop a deeper