Outcomes Assessment and Legal Research Pedagogy

Abstract

Assessment of learning outcomes has always been a part of the process of legal education in the United States. Law students must pass rigorous examinations at the end of each semester of law school, and they can be admitted to legal practice only after having passed a comprehensive bar examination. Recently, however, the American Bar Association has concluded that in addition to an “acceptable bar passage rate,” law schools must use “additional means” to measure student learning outcomes for “effective, ethical and responsible participation in the legal profession.” Accordingly, the ABA has been drafting new standards requiring assessment of learning outcomes. Moreover, learning outcomes are to be assessed not only at the end of a course in a traditional, summative assessment form such as a test, but also while learning is taking place during a course, i.e., formative assessment which can “provide meaningful feedback to improve student learning.” Assessment now becomes a driver of instructional and curriculum design to meet the assessment requirements. How these requirements will affect the pedagogy of legal research and the role of law librarians in legal education is as yet unclear. This paper will explore how using one of the most cited classification schemes in educational pedagogy, Bloom’s Taxonomy, could transform legal research pedagogy and what that may mean for the role of law librarians.

Keywords: outcomes assessment, legal research, law librarianship, teaching, pedagogy, ABA standards

JEL Classification: K19