Critical Perspectives On The Scholarship Of Assessment And Learning In Law

The Assessment in Legal Education book series offers perspectives on assessment in legal education across a range of Common Law jurisdictions. Each volume in the series provides: Information on assessment practices and cultures within a jurisdiction. A sample of innovative assessment practices and designs in a jurisdiction. Insights into how assessment can be used effectively across different areas of law, different stages of legal education and the implications for regulation of legal education assessment. Appreciation of the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research bases that are emerging in the field of legal education assessment generally. Analyses and suggestions of how assessment innovations may be transferred from one jurisdiction to another. The series will be useful for those seeking a summary of the assessment issues facing academics, students, regulators, lawyers and others in the jurisdictions under analysis. The exemplars of assessment contained in each volume may also be valuable in assisting cross-jurisdictional fertilisation of ideas and practices. This first volume focuses on assessment in law schools in England. It begins with an introduction to some recent trends in the culture and practice of legal education assessment. The first chapter focuses on the general regulatory context of assessment and learning in that jurisdiction, while the remainder of the book offers useful exemplars and expert critical discussion of assessment theories and practices. The series is based in the PEARL Centre (Profession, Education and Regulation in Law), in The Australian National University’s College of Law.

This edited book addresses contemporary challenges in clinical legal education (CLE), considering its role in legal education and in the broader community it serves. Written by experts from various international contexts, the book explores how the changing nature and requirements of legal practice alongside social and technological developments affect the pedagogy of clinical legal education. Chapters chart the development of clinical legal education across various jurisdictions and examine developments in programme design and supervision of and in CLE along with the role of CLE in the community. The authors also reflect on the dynamic and developing role of clinical legal education and offer recommendations for the future. This book will be essential reading for academics, researchers in clinical legal education, and those interested in legal education across the world. It will also be of interest to students of clinical legal education whose research requires a deeper understanding of the current themes and issues of the subject.

This book provides a significant contribution to conversations about teacher quality and graduate readiness for teaching. It presents empirical insights into how a multidisciplinary team of researchers, teacher educators, and policy personnel mobilized for collective change in a standards-driven reform initiative. The insights are research-informed and critically relevant for anyone interested in teacher preparation and credentialing. It gives an account of a bold move to install a collaborative culture of evidence-informed inquiry to professionalize teacher education. The centerpiece of the book is the use of standards and evidence to show the quality of graduates entering the teaching workforce. The book presents, for the first time, a model of online cross-institutional moderation as benchmarking to generate large-scale evidence of the quality of teacher education. The book also introduces a new conceptualization of a feedback loop using summative data for accountability and formative data to inform curriculum review and program renewal. This book offers the insider story of the conceptualization, design, and implementation of the Graduate Teacher Performance Assessment (GTPA). It involves going to scale with a large group of Australian universities, government agencies, and schools, and using participatory approaches to advance new thinking about evidence-informed inquiry, cross-institutional moderation, and innovative digital infrastructure. The discussion of competence assessment, standards, and change processes presented in the book has relevance beyond teacher education to other professions.

This book collects selected papers from the 9th Conference on Signal and Information Processing, Networking and Computers held online, in December, 2021. The book focuses on the current works of information theory, communication system, computer science, aerospace technologies, big data and other related technologies. Readers from both academia and industry of this field can contribute and find their interests from the book.

How we interpret and understand the historical contexts of legal education has profoundly affected how we understand contemporary educational cultures and practices. This book, the result of a Modern Law Review seminar, both celebrates and critiques the lasting impact of Peter Birks’ influential edited collection, Pressing Problems in the Law: Volume 2: What is the Law School for? Published in 1996, his book addresses many critical issues that are hauntingly present in the 21st century, amongst them the impact of globalisation; technological disruption; and the tension inherent in law schools as they seek to balance the competing interest of teaching, research and administration. Yet Birks’ collection misses key issues, too. The role of wellbeing, of emotion or affect, the relation of legal education to education, the status of legal education in what, since his volume, have become the devolved jurisdictions of Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland – these and others are absent from the research agenda of the book. Today, legal educators face new challenges. We are still recovering from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on our universities. In 1996 Birks was keen to stress the importance of comparative research within Europe. Today, legal researchers are dismayed at the possibility of losing valuable EU research funding when the UK leaves the EU, and at the many other negative effects of Brexit on legal education. The proposed Solicitors Qualifying Examination takes legal education regulation and professional learning into uncharted waters. This book discusses these and related impacts on our legal educations. As law schools approach an existential crossroads post-Covid-19, it seems timely to revisit Birks’ fundamental question: what are law schools for?

In the last few decades university teaching has been recognised as an activity which can be studied and improved through educational scholarship. In some disciplines this is now well established. It remains emergent in legal education. The field is rich with questions to be answered, issues to be raised. This book provides the first overall review of legal education scholarship. The chapters outline the history of legal education research and provide a detailed analysis of the trends in areas of publication. Beyond this, the book suggests a typology for further conceptualising the field and a series of suggested paths for future research. The book originated from the 2017 UNSW conference "Research in Legal Education: State of the Art?" It features internationally respected authors who bring their perspectives on how legal education – as a field of research – should be conceptualised. The collection is arranged into three themes. First, a historical view is taken of the emergence of legal education scholarship and its roots that predate modern educational theory. Secondly, the book provides overviews of the extant field of publications, highlighting areas of interest and neglect, and delineating the trends in current publication. Thirdly, the book provides a set of suggested typologies for describing legal education research and a series of essays for future directions which both critique current approaches and provide inspiration for future directions. The State of Legal Education Research represents an authoritative introduction to the field, a set of conceptual tools with which to describe it, and inspiration for researchers to expand and grow research into legal education.