Burton, K --- "Assessing Teamwork Skills in Law School: A Window of Opportunity" [2004] LegEdDig 18; (2004) 12(4) Legal Education Digest 3

Assessing Teamwork Skills in Law School: A Window of Opportunity

K Burton

[2004] LegEdDig 18; (2004) 12(4) Legal Education Digest 3

10 Murdoch Uni Electronic J of L 2, 2003, pp 1–26

Traditionally, law schools concentrated on teaching students the substantive law, which produced graduates with a sound technical knowledge, but not necessarily skills that are essential to practise law. Generic skills are important to the legal profession and they can be transferred to a non-legal context. An example of a generic skill is the ability to work in a team, i.e. teamwork skills. The main aim of this article is to determine how to assess teamwork skills, that is, the process, and to generate a strategy for law schools for how to assess teamwork skills.

The Queensland University of Technology Law School has embedded teamwork skills into its law degree in response to pressure from employers and students. It has identified three levels through which undergraduate law students progress to attain generic skills, such as teamwork skills. Students progress through level one in the first year of their law degree, through level two in their second year and level three in the third and fourth years. At level one, students are instructed in teamwork skills and may practise them under the guidance of a legal educator, who will provide feedback. Assessment at level one will usually include a critique of teamwork skills. At level two, students are required to be less dependent on the legal educator, who may still provide additional guidance at an advanced level and feedback, with students being expected to practise their skills in a ‘real world legal scenario’. At level three, students should be able to transfer their teamwork skills to any context without guidance from the legal educator and should be encouraged to reflect on their teamwork skills at all levels.

Assessment practices are valid when they assess what they are supposed to assess, that is, when they are aligned to the unit objectives. Assessment practices should be fair, that is, they should not disadvantage an individual or group of students. Student learning can also be improved by formative assessment, which informs students how they are performing and how they can improve. Formative assessment is analogous to the timely and incremental criteria.

Formative assessment should be distinguished from summative assessment, which is designed to satisfy credentialling agencies. Each assessment practice will be considered in light of the following criteria: valid; reliable; transparent; fair; formative; timely and incremental; and demanding and efficient. Finally, each assessment practice will be placed in a law school assessment strategy based on how the assessment practice meets the criteria listed above. Essentially, summative assessment results in a mark that counts toward, for example, a grade for a subject. Formative assessment does not in itself count towards a grade for a subject, but attempts to provide feedback to students on how they can improve their teamwork skills.

This assessment practice involves awarding a team mark for the product and not the process. The assessment of the product may be subjective, but if a legal educator marks all the products or if all markers understand the content and the criteria, then the assessment practice should be reliable. Formatively assessing the process increases the validity compared to those assessment practices that do not assess the process. To ensure that the assessment practice is reliable, the markers must understand the marking criteria.

Law schools may decide to formatively assess at level one because students are just coming to grips with the application of the skill and it provides them with the opportunity to improve before they are summatively assessed. The main flaw with this strategy is that students tend to ignore material or approaches which are not assessed or which they do not think will be assessed.

Alternatively, the legal educator may observe a student working in a team and on that basis assess the student’s ability to work in a team. Due to the criticisms relating to validity, perhaps the weighting of the process should be minimised where the legal educator assesses the process.

This assessment practice is more appropriate for level one because the legal educator only summatively assesses the process of working in a team in a theoretical manner or observes the application of teamwork skills at a basic level.

The peer marks may be averaged to arrive at the process mark for each individual in the team. The peers may mark the process by completing a questionnaire set by the legal educator, which is called peer-marking. Peers usually complete questionnaires to mark the contributions of team members. The opponents of peer-marking also claim that students will use different standards for the criteria to evaluate their team members. To overcome this drawback, legal educators should provide students with detailed guidelines on how to mark the process and explain the assessment criteria to them. There are other ways to increase the reliability of peer-marking and assessment. There is a strong correlation between increased reliability of peer-marking and student experience at peer-marking.

It is recommended that summative self-assessment or marking be introduced in the law degree at level three because level three students have developed their teamwork skills, received feedback from other sources on how they can improve their teamwork skills and are more experienced to make such judgments. As this assessment practice is very time consuming, law schools may be reluctant to implement it.

Law schools have traditionally only assessed what is produced by the team, that is, the product. They have neglected to assess the process of working in a team, that is, teamwork skills. There is a window of opportunity for the assessment of teamwork skills and law schools should approach it strategically so as to produce law graduates who have well developed teamwork skills and are independent lifelong learners.