Last week, I attended the Legal Education at the Crossroads conference at Denver University. A useful conference, with a lot of demonstrations.
There was much more coverage of student assessment than institutional assessment. That is, most of the sessions focused on ways to assess student performance other than through the standard one-shot end of semester final exam. The classic law school model is an example of summative assessment with no formative assessment. The conference provided a useful counterweight to that model by discussing options for formative assessment (i.e., assessment that occurs while the learning process is going on).
But the other half of the equation is assessing on an institution-wide basis what the individual student assessments tell you about the learning that is or is not going on. There were sessions devoted to the topic of institutional assessment, but–at least the ones I attended–ended up with a student assessment focus.
Jeff Rensberger
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 4:30 am and is filed under Assessment, Commentary, Conferences, Law Professors, Law Schools, Student Learning, Teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Notes on the Legal Education at the Crossroads, v. 3.0 Conference
Last week, I attended the Legal Education at the Crossroads conference at Denver University. A useful conference, with a lot of demonstrations.
There was much more coverage of student assessment than institutional assessment. That is, most of the sessions focused on ways to assess student performance other than through the standard one-shot end of semester final exam. The classic law school model is an example of summative assessment with no formative assessment. The conference provided a useful counterweight to that model by discussing options for formative assessment (i.e., assessment that occurs while the learning process is going on).
But the other half of the equation is assessing on an institution-wide basis what the individual student assessments tell you about the learning that is or is not going on. There were sessions devoted to the topic of institutional assessment, but–at least the ones I attended–ended up with a student assessment focus.
Jeff Rensberger
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 4:30 am and is filed under Assessment, Commentary, Conferences, Law Professors, Law Schools, Student Learning, Teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.