Law students learn to reason better by studying examples
 | Starting and advanced law students learn to reason better by studying worked-out case studies. This poses CELSTEC's Fleurie Nievelstein in her PhD Learning law: Expertise differences and the effect of instructional support.
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Additionally, starting students are better able to consult law books after they have learnt to search in a condense law book. On Friday 18 September 2009 she takes her doctoral degree at the Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies (CELSTEC) of the Open Universiteit Nederland in Heerlen in The Netherlands.
Research
An important goal of law education is that students learn to reason about legal problems (cases). They experience difficulties doing this. Nievelstein tried in her research to gain insight in the nature of those difficulties and on top of this she investigated the requirements an effective educational method needs to meet. Nievelstein: ‘Analysis of different interventions proved that both beginning and advanced students learn best by studying elaborated examples, which include a detailed problem description, the right solution and the steps leading to the right solution.”
Various studies showed that starting students have trouble interpreting legal concepts. This gives teachers a hard time creating shared understanding. And students do not take advantage from the possibility to consult a law book while they are solving a case. This means that their achievements of solving a case do not improve compared with the achievements of students who cannot use a law book to solve a case.
The search process in such a source involves too high a cognitive burden, as a result of which learning is hindered.
Research results prove that this burden can be decreased by supporting students with a condense version of the law book. When they could consult the complete law book after the learning phase, they performed better at solving a case than students who were not supported. Students then knew what they were looking for.
Experiment successful in practice
Nievelstein did her research with students of the School of Law at the Universiteit Maastricht and the Universiteit van Tilburg. In Tilburg they immediately started experimenting in practice. Starters were supported last year by elaborated examples and subsequently the results of their exams were watched. These appeared to be higher than the results of the previous years.
About Fleurie Nievelstein
Fleurie Nievelstein (27) from Landgraaf is studying educational psychology at the Universiteit Maastricht. As of the end of 2004 she is working as a Ph D student at the Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies (CELSTEC) of the Open Universiteit Nederland in Heerlen. During her doctoral project she was a teacher at the master training Educational sciences.
Ceremony
The doctoral ceremony will start at 04.00 PM on 18 September 2009 at the Open Universiteit Nederland, Valkenburgerweg 177 in Heerlen.
Read the full text of the dissertation
