Instructional support for novice law students: Reducing search processes and explaining concepts in cases

Abstract

Nievelstein, F., Van Gog, T., Van Dijck, G., & Boshuizen, H. P. A. (2010). Instructional support for novice law students: Reducing search processes and explaining concepts in cases. Applied Cognitive Psychology. DOI: 10.1002/acp.1707Reasoning about legal cases is a complex skill that imposes a high working memory load, especially for novice students. Not only do novices lack necessary conceptual knowledge, searching through the information sources that are used during reasoning can also be assumed to impose a high additional working memory load that does not contribute to learning. Therefore, this study investigated the effects of supporting novice law students’ learning by (a) providing the meaning of important concepts in the case and (b) reducing the search process by providing a condensed (relevant articles only) rather than a complete civil code. Results show that performance on a test case (for which they had to use the complete civil code) was significantly better for participants who had used the condensed civil code during learning. Performance on a conceptual knowledge post-test was significantly enhanced when students had received the concept explanations during learning

The worked example and expertise reversal effect in less structured tasks: Learning to reason about legal cases

“…The number of points to be gained for each argument, depended on the importance of the argument to reach the correct solution. In total 100 points could be gained (see also Nievelstein et al, 2011). Two raters scored 10% of the data.…”

“…It is possible that third-year students in the problem-solving conditions performed better on the tasks because they had more conceptual knowledge and were more familiar with the organization of the civil code. This combination would result in more effective and efficient search processes for those students, while first-year students experience many difficulties with those aspects of the task (Nievelstein et al, 2011). However, subsequently using the information found in that search process to develop a good line of argument in relation to the case, is a highly variable task component that might still be difficult for third-year students (see e.g., Voss, 2006), which might explain why they still benefitted from the examples.…”

“…Although this condensed code provided effective instructional support for learning, there was still a substantial amount of room for improvement in the test performance scores in the study by Nievelstein et al (2011). Therefore, instructional formats offering higher degrees of instructional guidance, such as descriptions of 'process steps' or worked examples, might be even more beneficial for novice law students' performance.…”

“…Without such knowledge, students are likely to engage in ineffective search processes, which impose a high cognitive load but do not contribute much to learning (i.e., extraneous load; Sweller et al, 1998). Indeed, it has been shown that novice law students learned significantly more when the extraneous load imposed by ineffective search processes during learning was reduced by providing students with a condensed civil code that contained only those articles relevant for the cases at hand, rather than the complete code which they normally have to use (Nievelstein, Van Gog, Van Dijck, & Boshuizen, 2011).…”

Development and validation of a Supportive Learning Environment for Expertise Development Questionnaire (SLEED-Q)

“…Arts et al 2002;Nievelstein et al 2011) have provided evidence that development of professional expertise is a malleable process that is responsive to wellconceived, skilfully implemented interventions. These authors discussed educational and instructional implications which foster students' development in professional expertise.…”