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
More on the Legal Education at the Crossroads conference
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009The conference was weighted toward clinical and skills faculty in terms of the composition of the panels and the audience. This is not meant as a criticism. My take is that skills faculty have long been engaged in a richer and more meaningful assessment of students than have doctrinal faculty. One way to characterize the increased emphasis on assessment in law school is that the clinicians (and the MacCrate and Carnegie reports) are ascendant. So, it makes some sense that many presentations would give examples of assessment in a skills setting. But if the mission is to change the practices of doctrinal faculty, more of them need to be at conferences like this and more of them need to be present to answer the Big Question, which is taken up in my next post.
Jeff Rensberger
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