“He who knows most, knows best how little he knows.” Thomas Jefferson.
In my last post, I discussed “the testing effect” and how it can help students learn law better. Today’s post focuses on metacognition and self-regulated learning (SRL). Unlike the testing effect, these two interrelated topics have some exposure in legal education, and that exposure has led to studies concluding that metacognition and SRL lead to better results. Like the testing effect, however, too few students know about these concepts, and the traditional law school environment doesn’t emphasize their use. This is problematic, because metacognition and SRL could be game-changers in legal education.
More below the fold….
An important problem exists in terms of how students view their role in their legal education. In high school, the overabundance of standardized testing leads to teaching-to-the-test. Teaching-to-the-test leads to excessive control over students’ learning in an attempt to control test results. In college, the modern devaluation of critical-thinking skills, created perhaps by a de-emphasis on liberal arts education, leads to a failure to teach students to control their own learning. It’s not a surprise, then, that one study showed that law students, despite their high intelligence, generally do not start law school with strong metacognitive skills.
As a result, many students enter law school ready for their professors not only to teach them law but also to police their learning process. Too many assume that faculty are (or should be) giving them all they need to succeed. They assume that reading the assigned materials, briefing cases, and attending classes will suffice. Outlining starts, if at all, towards the end of the semester; and as exams approach, common wisdom has it that students should reread outlines and take a look at professors’ old exams to game how they test.
This is woefully inadequate….
Enter metacognition and SRL….
The broadest definition of metacognition derives from its origins in epistemology. There, metacognition is the process of knowing that one knows. More narrowly, according to Beran, et al (2012) in the field of cognitive science, metacognition is monitoring and regulating the internal process of cognition. The commonly used phrase is “thinking about thinking.” In educational psychology, the emphasis is on monitoring and questioning one’s learning with the purpose of improving the result of the learning task; “do I really get it, and if not what should I do about?” A recent study found that students with higher incoming indicators improved performance better after formative assessment than others, and the authors theorized that those students’ stronger metacognitive skills explained that difference.
Meanwhile, one can think of self-regulated learning as actualizing metacognition. SRL, as Dean Michael Hunter Schwartz quoted, "involves the active, goal-directed, self-control of behavior, motivation, and cognition for academic tasks by an individual student.” Learning is something students do, not something that is done to them. SRL involves planning how to learn, monitoring the learning as cognition occurs, and then critically reflecting on the success of the learning task with an eye towards finding and eliminating weaknesses. Given that the heart of this approach is self-awareness and critique, it’s no surprise that studies have shown that healthy skepticism is a trait most associated with academic success in law school.
Importantly, SRL necessitates that students own the learning and not outsource that responsibility to others. (Hence, my aversion to students receiving “tutoring.”) Certain practices in law school can hinder that goal. When the crowd mentality convinces students to stick to the conventional wisdom of law school studying, that hinders SRL. When faculty tell students that they may not use any materials other than the casebook, that hinders SRL. When faculty dissuade students from taking practice exams – either explicitly or implicitly by declining to post old exams – that hinders SRL. Due to these practices, students are unable to assess their own strengths and weaknesses objectively, and their learning suffers.
Instead, the law school environment needs to promote SRL. To that end, legal educators need to convey that, because of the volume of law to learn, students’ exam prep starts the day after orientation. To start that prep, students need to do several things on a weekly basis.
Obviously, students need to prepare for class adequately and attend class. Most students follow these steps but do no more. They leave class with misunderstandings (whether they know it or not), and they do nothing to fix the misunderstanding or even determine objectively whether they have them. This is the Rumsfeldian unknown unknowns – they don’t know what they don’t know.
As a result, I counsel my 1Ls to take three additional steps at the end of each week. First: Synthesize. In this step, students need to synthesize the law fully by using their reading notes, class notes, and whatever hornbooks are appropriate. (This is where we sometimes fail students. Rightly believing that a great deal of commercial schlock exists in the supplement market, faculty sometimes tell students not to use any resources other than the casebook. This not only ignores the fact that plenty of hornbooks are of solid quality, but it also ignores the need for students to correct their own learning weaknesses. When I taught criminal law, for instance, I recommended Dressler’s “Understanding Criminal Law,” and I gave students the advice to stay away from the resources of lesser quality).
Second: Outline. Here, students should memorialize their synthesized knowledge immediately. Thanks to the “forgetting effect,” at the end of a given week students know much more about that week’s doctrine than they will know even just a few days later. As such, they should memorialize this knowledge at the time when it’s at its peak. An additional benefit is that if students outline material weekly, they won’t have 600 pages of casebook to outline at the end of the semester. (The end of the semester is then devoted to refining the outlining, self-testing on its substance, and taking practice exams.)
Third: Objective Self-Testing. After synthesizing and memorializing, students should objectively test themselves on their learning. Using multiple-choice questions, CALIs, Examples & Explanations problems, or any other method of questioning, students should prove to themselves that they successfully synthesized the law in the previous steps. If they find weaknesses, they should return to the step one and sure up their knowledge.
I’ve consistently found that this approach substantially improves students’ knowledge and performance. Using these methods, students employ metacognition and engage in the three steps of SRL. Not only does this approach benefit students in law school and on the bar exam, it also makes them better lawyers. While other new associates need handholding and feedback from senior associates and partners, self-regulated learners can better monitor their own knowledge and performance.
Next time, I’ll address the concept of “spaced repetition.”
I don't have any strong objection to these posts (other than to the fact that you quoted my last point about "this sounds like Kingfield" but refused to post my comment.)
Thus, not as an objection or criticism, but, really, just an honest observation: when you take out all the window dressing (references to studies of human learning, cognition, etc.) do you really portray this post as "new" thinking about law school learning?
Read the material, attend class, maintain skepticism, outline, read "Understanding ..." and the hornbook, take practice tests at the end of the semester.
This was the plan in the Paper Chase. This has been the standard fare for at least forty years. There is literally NOTHING new about any of these prescriptions. I am not guessing here.
Sorry, but it seems so much of the "new" stuff, with all the buzzwords and fancy jargon -- is just the old stuff.
Law profs love to pose as something else: an economist, a psychiatrist, a human cognition expert, etc.
Nothing here is new vis a vis the students, but what is new is the rampant dilettantism. I look forward to something new about teaching.
So far, these posts about law school student learning are sort of cliché.
Posted by: anon | October 07, 2016 at 01:17 AM
Anon,
Thanks for your thoughts. Let me start by saying I think there's some validity to what you're saying. What I'm hearing is that you thought I was saying "here's some completely new method of learning that students should use." If traditional study methods were A,B,C, and D, you thought I was saying that I just created "E." Instead, I'm saying let's use the science to do A.B, C, and D in a more effective and efficient way and to convince students and faculty that these improvements ought to be used.
Let me see if I can address your specific concerns.
1. One of your thoughts was that profs are dilettantes, and (implicitly) that my foray into cognitive science is evidence of that. Here's the thing, in my line of work I HAVE to know this stuff. Part of my work is to support students who are struggling in law school. At my school, the vast majority of these students don't lack for aptitude. Most are just going about the law school learning thing WAY wrong. Why? Because that's the way they were taught how to learn in undergrad, etc.
In other words, these aren't students who shouldn't be in law school; they just need to change their learning in a big way. I have to know the details of learning science in order to figure out what they're doing wrong, how to tweak their approaches to studying, and how to prepare them to move forward on their own. When I recommend methods to them that are WAY outside what their colleagues are doing, I can back it up with science and not anecdote.
Academic support is not about just reteaching the law or correcting split infinitives. In order to produce real results (less attrition, improved grades, increased bar passage rates), we have to use very different methods than just more of the same of what students do in their classes.
2. Your second point was that everything I've said was just the same-old, same-old. That's not really my experience, and my point in this post was to try to move the ball in terms of the way law professors think about how students should learn. In my experience, speaking to ASP colleagues across the nation, too many (well-meaning) profs attempt to control students' learning. Moreover, too many schools are trying to improve bar passage rates by implementing programs that increase control over students. My thesis in this post was that schools should actually go the opposite direction.
Additionally, and I grant you that I didn't make this clear, I teach students all this stuff about cognitive science. Honestly, they tell me that my methods completely run counter to everything they (think they) know about how to "do" law school and all the messaging they get about studying.
More broadly, you say that my advice boils down to read the materials, read hornbooks, etc. That's not the case. What's new about what I'm saying includes: (1) students should create cognitive schema from the beginning of the semester (via outlining or other methods); (2) students should test their knowledge weekly as self-regulation and not just assume they get it; (3) students should develop their own study methods and consider it their responsibility to master the material; they shouldn't follow the mob or follow their college study routines; and (4) they should use spaced repetition and cognitive schema to digest doctrine better (more on this in later posts). They shouldn't assume that if they follow their professor's syllabus, that's all they need to know.
In short, throughout the semester, they should go beyond reading and attending class every single week by doing the additional steps I've laid out. This is very different from what law students actually do and what many faculty think is (or should be) the norm.
3. I also want to address your point that the citations to studies are mere window dressing. If I just come in here and say "here's what I do, just trust me," I wouldn't be that convincing. Instead, I'm trying to prove my points by saying "you don't have to believe me; this is based on empirically proven concepts." In my experience, this approach makes it more likely that students and faculty buy in.
4. Lastly, you say you look forward to new teaching methods. The point of my series of posts here is not to discuss what faculty could do differently. It's to discuss what students should do differently.
Posted by: Louis Schulze | October 07, 2016 at 10:37 AM
Look at it this way: Would you rather have a 1990 PC or a 2016 PC? Yes, the approach to legal education that Professor Schulze is discussing in these posts is that much better than the traditional method. The new approach can incorporate the Socratic/case method, but there needs to be much more. In two words that more is active learning. Professor Schulze has been giving the details in these posts, like retrieval practice, spaced practice, metacognition, and self-regulated learning. I am sure that there is more to come in his future posts.
The main point is that law schools can do much better by using these extensively-tested methods. Some law schools, like FIU, are already doing so, but all law schools must adopt the approaches to turn out the best students they can.
Posted by: Scott Fruehwald | October 07, 2016 at 02:21 PM
The best training and learning experience I received in law school was when the Professors pushed forward with the material even though I didn't completely understand or catch on. It took me awhile to begin to "think like a lawyer" and absorb the concepts. It was a challenge. Many of my classmates came from "law" families and had an aptitude for this stuff. Nobody coddled me. Along with the regularly assigned material, I had to double down and read the Nutshells, Gilberts and Hornbooks. I had a strong desire to catch on. That experience even helps me today when I appear before a volume court judge. The law is always a learning process. Nobody should be coddled in law school. That judge with 300 defendants on her docket is not going to wait so you can "catch on."
Posted by: Captain Hruska Carswell, Continuance King | October 07, 2016 at 04:02 PM
The approach that Professor Schulze is talking about doesn't coddle law students. In fact, it is more rigorous than existing methods because it involves active learning. Also, read his comment above: "If I just come in here and say 'here's what I do, just trust me,' I wouldn't be that convincing. Instead, I'm trying to prove my points by saying 'you don't have to believe me; this is based on empirically proven concepts.'"
Posted by: Scott Fruehwald | October 07, 2016 at 04:30 PM
Captain,
I couldn't possibly agree with you more. It sounds like you used ... wait for it ... metacognition and self-regulation.
Thanks for your support.
LNS
Posted by: Louis Schulze | October 07, 2016 at 05:07 PM