Facilitating skills transfer: a collaborative writing centre intervention for undergraduate Law students

Abstract

Despite the ability to write being central to success in the legal profession, there is general consensus concerning the poor writing skills of law graduates. In an attempt to address these concerns, this paper reports on the joint effort of subject experts and writing centre practitioners to address law students’ legal writing skills early on in their law degree. The objective of the study was to evaluate the potential impact of a blended, subject-specific writing intervention designed to address first-year Law students’ academic essay writing skills in terms of structure, organisation and argumentation. A multistage evaluation design was adopted to measure the potential impact of the intervention by collecting qualitative and quantitative data at various stages to triangulate the findings of the study. The results showed a statistically significant improvement in the submissions of students who engaged fully in the various stages of the writing intervention. This study contributes to research that shows that by embedding writing development initiatives in disciplines which form part of disciplinary course assessment, higher education institutions might begin to make headway in meeting their obligation to ensure that students possess the key graduate attributes that are required to make a contribution to the workplace.

Writing Anxiety: The Case of Law Students

“…In another research investigating employers' evaluation on the legal writing skills of law students at a Malaysian university, 44.2% of the 43 respondents evaluated the students' legal writing ability as just moderate, 34.9% regarded it as good, and only 18.6% assessed it as very good (Mohammad Azam Hussain et al, 2020). Therefore, even though the legal profession thrives on writing ability to a significant extent, there is a common agreement on law graduates' meagre and inadequate writing skills (Campbell, 2014;Drennan & Keyser, 2022;Louw & Broodryk, 2016).…”

Learning profiles and their relation to the experiences of learning generic skills at the end of the first year of university study

“…Communication skills, ranging from verbal (written or oral) to non-verbal communication, are regarded as the abilities one uses when giving and receiving different kinds of information and communicating it to different audiences. The ability to communicate effectively is essential for learning from the very beginning of higher education studies (Kleemola et al, 2022) and it is also considered central to academic careers (Drennan and Keyser, 2022).…”

“…Therefore, the aim of the current study is to examine, utilizing a person-oriented approach, the relationship between approaches to learning and experiences of learning three generic skills, namely critical thinking, collaboration and communication skills, at the end of first year of study in law and social science. In both disciplines, critical thinking, collaboration and communication are key generic skills that students are expected to learn during their university studies (Abrandt Dahlgren et al, 2006;Drennan and Keyser, 2022;Haarala-Muhonen et al, 2022). Law and social sciences have a lot in common, for example, they both address the questions related to society.…”

From 'business as usual' to 'business unusual': Online academic literacy development for education students during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“…Given the importance of academic literacy practices in HE, writing centres have the mandate to ensure that students develop the necessary skills to succeed (Drennan & Keyser, 2022;Guskaroska et al, 2022;Khumalo & Onwuegbuchulam, 2023). This is because academic literacies are "linked to student access which includes both retention and throughput" (Archer, 2008: 248).…”