Lessons learnt from the Legal Research Skills Programme

Sandra Meredith, University of Oxford

Presentation at UKCLE seminar on teaching and learning for legal skills trainers, 16 February 2005

Sandra’s session described her research into how students related a standalone legal research skills programme to their everyday study, a key issue associated with standalone skills programmes.

Sandra teaches the Legal Research Skills Programme at the University of Oxford, together with Angela Carritt of the Bodleian Law Library.

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Students studying for the undergraduate law (jurisprudence) degree at Oxford are required to successfully complete a standalone Legal Research Skills Programme (LRSP). This programme was developed by the Faculty of Law in response to the 1998 Law Society and Bar Council Joint statement on qualifying law degrees (PDF file), which, like the Quality Assurance Agency’s law benchmark statements, requires certain skills development in undergraduate law degrees. The LRSP consists of three units:

1. a two hour hands-on introduction to legal databases
2. an investigation of statute and case law books
3. an all day group research activity.

The LRSP is separate from the students’ main study of law – it is not integrated into it.

There are two main models for teaching skills in universities; embedded and standalone models. Embedded models, which are favoured by educational theorists, range from wholesale redesign of curricula so that skills are developed in concert with discipline knowledge, to listing skills in learning objectives and assessment tasks. This sort of skills learning has been the object of what little research there has been into skills learning in law. There has been even less research into student learning in standalone legal research skills programmes, which continue to be developed for reasons such as cost, institutional barriers and conceptions of the nature of the discipline.

In 2004 I interviewed six students and surveyed 154 to find out how they related unit 1 of the LRSP – a standalone programme – to their main study of law. In unit 1 students are introduced to skills for using legal databases to access case law, statutes and articles. This research investigated whether students subsequently practised and developed those skills in their everyday study, and the role assessment played in developing these skills.

The LRSP is compulsory, so all first year law students did the training. The research found that the training appeared to be related to high levels of usage; 73% of students in this study used legal databases at least weekly to access case law. This compared favourably with 13% of students accessing online case law, as reported in Spencer’s study (2002), which recommended training in legal databases. To a lesser extent, the LRSP students also used databases to source statutes and articles.

Students learnt about database functionality and holdings from the unit 1 instruction and handouts, and their knowledge and ability to use the databases effectively developed through experimentation during the term as they searched for materials on their reading lists. The more students searched the databases, the better they become at using them, and the more able to transfer skills from one database to another. The overwhelming reason why students used legal databases was to find sources, especially cases, from their reading lists. The necessity of getting through the reading list as part of essay writing for tutorials in the students’ main area of study was the key motivation for students to continue to develop their legal research skills. While doing the LRSP itself is compulsory, the ongoing formative assessment associated with the weekly reading and essay writing was important in capturing student effort to become competent database users.

Relationships between growing discipline knowledge and skills development

While this research was limited to the first unit of the LRSP and to the students’ first term, it did suggest weaknesses in the standalone model. The legal research students did was circumscribed by what they were required to do for their main area of study; in this case, study reading lists and write essays for tutorials. Even within this fairly narrow framework of searching databases for specific references, however, some students’ database skills were quite unsophisticated, and they did not adequately evaluate the results of their searches. For example, some students read summaries of cases rather than the full text of a judgment because they didn’t know how to find the full text, but the more they used the databases, the more they were able to distinguish between the information being returned.

Similarly, a significant minority of students chose to read out of date statutes, sourcing them from the Internet or from databases that don’t update statutes, possibly because they preferred the format of these statutes as single rather than fragmented documents. With a greater understanding of the discipline, they would become more aware of the importance of using amended statutes and more selective about the sources they used.

The extensive reading lists that dominate an Oxford law student’s study week, while being the key reason students developed skills in using legal databases, also proved a limitation on the sort of research these students undertook. The vast majority of students (86%) indicated that they had no time to read beyond their reading list. Students predominantly used legal databases to find references they’d been given, not to do their own research. This suggests they were not called upon to think about where or how to look for legal resources that might solve a problem, or about the quality or relevance of the legal resources found, which are important components of legal research skills. In the rare event that they did independent research, the students were more likely to use unsophisticated search techniques in Internet search engines than to use legal databases.

It is important to bear in mind that unit 1 is introductory and taught at the very beginning of an undergraduate degree. The research investigated students who had done only had one term of law study, and it was clear that they had been accessing online primary resources frequently. In the third term the LRSP includes an applied research task in which students are required to carry out independent research; further opportunities to carry out research as part of their study of the discipline will help students develop broader research skills. The literature indicates that there is an important relationship between skills development and subject knowledge; students need ongoing opportunities to act as autonomous information users and opportunities for reflection on their learning. However, providing these opportunities in an ongoing way is challenging within the framework of a standalone skills programme.

Do learning skills enhance students’ overall learning experience?

Students generally thought that unit 1, and legal research skills in general, were useful for their own study. Even students who thought they could have learnt these skills by themselves, and who may not have attended unit 1 if it wasn’t compulsory, found the training an incentive to begin using the databases. Interestingly, students indicated that they read different sources in different ways; most preferred to read a book version of journal articles, which they considered dense and in need of careful reading, and preferred to read cases online.

Students preferred reading cases online for several reasons. One reason was ease and speed of access, at any time of the day. Another was that internal navigation in electronic case reports made them easier and quicker to read. Some students used the online databases as a desktop tool to explore references to cases as they read their textbooks, or to get ideas for writing critically about particular judgments. Being able to sort, search and file electronic case reports, and to copy and paste quotes into essays and study notes, was considered an advantage of using legal databases. These factors suggest that developing legal research skills, especially those related to using legal databases and IT more generally, enriched these students’ learning experience even within a very traditional programme.

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Last Modified: 4 June 2010