Developing research skills

In her paper Caroline Coles (De Montfort University) presented an analysis of the need for advanced research skills and led a discussion on tools and techniques to encourage critical thinking.

Caroline’s slides are embedded below.

Caroline’s teaching seeks to meet the challenges of a skills gap between the increasing complexity of socio-legal resources and the declining level of authoritative and reflective research skills amongst students as identified by the Nuffield Report on empirical legal research (2006).

Primarily through her teaching on the research methodology module on the LLM/Diploma in Legal Practice at De Montfort she seeks to motivate students to engage with their subject, to develop ethical, critical and reflective skills for evaluating the law and ideally conducting their own research, and to develop a ‘scholarship of discovery’.

Caroline’s work is affected by a concern that some postgraduate learners demonstrate limited experience of critical or creative thinking and have a view of legal research that is restricted to the proprietary legal databases and Google. She speculates that a contribution to this has been the growth of strategic learning at lower levels of the educational structure and the growth of ‘user generated content’.

In 1990 Ernest Boyer, President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, advanced a model of five realms of scholarship (of discovery, integration, application, teaching, and engagement). The LLM/Diploma in Legal Practice fits particularly well into this model – a key outcome of the course is to develop a “critical awareness of the factors which shape legal practice in (a) chosen area of practice”, but the exercise of this model is not without problems, including dealing with students whose focus is not traditionally academic.

About Caroline

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Caroline Coles is a principal lecturer and solicitor in the Department of Professional Legal Studies at Leicester De Montfort Law School and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is also an assessor and external examiner for the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
 
In addition to teaching business law and research skills on the LLM/Diploma in Legal Practice and intellectual property law on the Legal Practice Course Caroline is responsible for teaching research methodology and supervising students on the Masters in Law courses for practitioners at De Montfort. She also provides skills training for teaching staff.

Last Modified: 9 July 2010