Almond, P --- "Using an enquiry-based learning project to develop criminological understanding" [2009] LegEdDig 34; (2009) 17(3) Legal Education Digest 11

• Using an enquiry-based learning project to develop criminological understanding

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Using an enquiry-based learning project to develop criminological understanding

P Almond

3 Web J of Current Legal Issues, 2009, pp1–9.

Criminology is a sociological discipline which is regularly taught as an adjunct to a wide range of other academic subjects, including Psychology, Chemistry, Politics, and Law. As a criminologist within a Law School, I have become well aware of some specific challenges that arise in relation to teaching this subject to final-year law students, such as the difficulty in not assuming a background familiarity with sociological and political ideas and concepts; in common with other ‘theoretical’ subjects on the law syllabus, student familiarity with underlying theoretical ideas is often largely eroded during the two preceding years of a law degree. One particular problem has been the need to impress upon the students the purpose of the discipline; in the absence of precedents and rules to be established through statutes and case decisions, students often fail to appreciate that the theoretical content of the module is intended to translate into practical changes and developments in the ‘real world’ of the criminal justice system.

Accusations of ‘penal populism’, whereby policy is made on the basis of its likely public appeal rather than on the basis of any evidence or consideration of efficacy, have placed a renewed emphasis on understanding the ways in which theory and research can, and should, inform policymaking. As such, encouraging students to also engage in this process is an important aim of the module.

During the academic year 2007–08 I implemented an assessed project to try and encourage students enrolled on the Criminology module to develop a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the links between criminological theory and policymaking within the criminal justice system. ‘Responses to crime’ such as the policing and prison systems, crime prevention and CCTV, and restorative and diversionary justice, constitute one component part of the module and amount to approximately 25 per cent of the module content. Yet students, perhaps because of the tendency towards the compartmentalisation of knowledge that is a by-product of modular university teaching systems, have tended to struggle to generate links between this area and the rest of the module themselves unless given specific direction and examples, and so have not tended to successfully fulfil this specific learning outcome in the past. This problem has not in the past been helped by a tendency to assess these different parts of the module separately and in isolation; the exam questions and assessed coursework component of the module tended to stick to one substantive area of the module rather than ranging more broadly across different fields.

It was determined that the most productive way of addressing this problem was to realign the assessment activities on the module with the intended learning outcomes in order to ensure that the hoped-for skills were actually being inculcated, in line with constructive alignment techniques. Constructive alignment states that learning opportunities and assessments must be designed in order to fit in with the goals and aims set out in the learning outcomes, thereby giving students the opportunity to develop those specified skills, and ensuring that the module assessment actually measures and tests these skills. When drawing up the learning outcomes for the criminology module, I was keen to ensure that the students were being assessed on the skills and approaches that made criminology a valuable and distinctive discipline.

In order to prompt the creativity and breadth of outlook that was sought, and to align the assessment with the intended learning outcome, a much broader assignment was needed, which would give students a degree of freedom to utilise their high-level ‘deep’ learning skills and produce outcomes that demonstrate more complex levels of understanding, in line with the higher levels of the SOLO taxonomy.

A redesign of the assessed work project within the module was therefore undertaken in order to try and align the assessment activities for the module more squarely with the learning outcomes.

Enquiry-based, or problem-based learning (EBL/PBL), is where knowledge is generated as a consequence of trying to solve a problem; as Boud observes, ‘The principal idea behind problem-based learning is ... that the starting point for learning should be a problem, a query or a puzzle that the learner wishes to solve’. Discussion with peers allows students to consider what approaches might be appropriate in trying to reach a solution, and to determine what must be learned in order to reach that solution. Because the problem is open-ended and has no ‘correct’ answer or outcome, and because a degree of flexibility of thought is required in determining how to solve the problem as well as what the solution should be, students learn both substantive content and thinking strategies at the same time.

Students can best gain an understanding of the way that theory transfers into policy and practice by working for criminal justice system professionals who actually make policy; the learning outcome can thus be met by translating the academic into the practical. By engaging students in advising on the policymaking process, working for a ‘real world’ client, and applying theoretical knowledge in order to solve a specific problem, they would be able to uncover these theory-practice links for themselves as an outcome of delivering reasoned policy proposals to the client. This idea formed the basis for the subsequent project.

When it came to implementing this idea, one important and intractable problem was encountered at the offset; there is a shortage of ‘real world’ clients for students to work with in the criminal justice sphere, and those that do exist deal with issues of such sensitivity and gravity that it is extremely difficult to envisage how students could meaningfully be engaged in this. A solution was found by ‘creating’ a fictional client, Sir Geoffrey Hagan, the Government Minister for Justice, who would set out the aims and objectives of a project that the criminology students would complete; this was to be Project Panacea. The Minister would allocate a notional budget of £100m for the individual student to spend on introducing a range of criminal justice policies into practice; each policy (of a total number of 20) had an individual cost of between £10–40m, thereby requiring students to manage the funds and prioritise goals when making their choices; the total expenditure had to come to no more than £100m. These costs were notional in the sense that they did not realistically reflect the actual sums involved in criminal justice policymaking. Students were instructed that they had to allocate the funds so as to ‘deliver policy choices which are fully justified and reflect a coherent set of underlying theoretical principles, which reflect criminological research and evidence, and are fully assessed for their likely effectiveness and limitations’.

Right at the beginning of the project, students were introduced to their ‘client’ via a press release and a project launch document; this set out the terms of the project and contextualised it within the wider operation of the criminal justice system. The policy items that were set out in a project ‘manifest’, with a value and a short description of each one provided, and students also ‘met’ the Minister via a video podcast broadcast in a lecture. The policy options that students were selecting from were set out in a project ‘manifest’, with a value and a short description of each one; one example of such an item was:

Item 16: Inside Recruitment

This item involves a scheme which gives some convicted offenders employment opportunities on release from prison. Working in partnership with SuperElec, a national energy supplier, vocational training will be offered within prison so that prisoners can take up jobs as electrical engineers upon their release. This is intended to ensure that prisoners can contribute to society and avoid the problems associated with unemployment. This would be available to 10 per cent of prisoners.

Cost: £35m

This particular item was based on a series of programs that have been implemented within British prisons, and which offer convicted prisoners a potential pathway out of offending behaviour cycles. Using policy ‘items’ of this sort was calculated as the best way to provide some form of parameter to the solution of the project; students have a wide range of options to choose, and can do so in a myriad number of combinations, but they must still remain within the broad scope of the project and cannot go too far down blind alleyways or into the realms of fantasy. This bounded autonomy did, however, still give students complete freedom in terms of the way in which they justified and explained their choices, and also meant that they had to engage with a more defined (although still very broad) body of research literature.

The project brief specified the two stages of the project. Firstly, they would be required to present some initial ideas (focused on one substantive area of practice) as a group in a tutorial class setting; this stage was intended to get them engaged with the project and sharing some general ideas about how to recognise links between theoretical ideas and practical implications and uses. These presentations were not assessed and did not contribute to the module mark. Secondly, the students would have to produce an independent piece of written work; this would be completely unrelated to the group presentation and would form the basis of the summative assessment. The project briefing gave students a list of objectives to be achieved as a result of their written reports, which had to (1) refer to a coherent set of underlying theoretical principles; (2) outline clearly the way your budget of £100million has been allocated; (3) justify your item choices via reference to Criminological research and evidence; (4) critically evaluate the likely effectiveness and limitations of the items chosen; and (5) meet the key goals set out by the Minister for Justice (the proposals should be cost-effective, produce demonstrable outcomes, and take a consistent approach).

All of the material that students received was ‘written by’ the Minister for Justice or his staff, and was presented and formatted in the style of a formal government publication. The visual and conceptual presentation of the project involved a number of innovations, including the provision of a launch document with a ‘government-style’ statement of objectives from the Minister (culled from other official documents), accompanied by a launch video featuring the ‘Minister’ setting out the aims of the project, and additional documents (project briefings, item manifests, referencing guides) which were all formatted consistently in the style of a government publication. The project was supported using e-learning facilities, including the use of a designated non-staff email address for the project to allow students to communicate directly with ‘the Minister’ and his staff about the project, and the use of a designated Blackboard page to provide updates on the project as the Minster’s thinking changed, in the form of official memos and audio/visual podcast episodes. Finally an audio/visual podcast was used in a revision session after the assessed work submission, to provide generic feedback from ‘the Minister’ on student performance on the project, and to make explicit what the aims were, and how this should translate into future performance.

Of these innovations, the most important was the use of the University’s VLE, Blackboard, to facilitate changes in the project as it progressed. These changes were fully publicised so that students did not miss them, and took place sufficiently early in the project that they did not detrimentally affect student performance of the task. This reflexivity and contingency was introduced as a direct adjunct to the learning outcomes – to illustrate something of the reality of policymaking in government, and demonstrate how external pressures affect research projects. This also reflects some of the key concerns of problem-based learning techniques, such as the emphasis on making assessment activities open-ended and ‘problematised’ simulations of real-life practices. In this case, the Minister became panicked by bad media coverage at one point and introduced a new policy item in response, the costs of several items were changed when it was realised that certain items had hidden overheads attached to them, and the group presentation was directed at a particular set of concerns by the Minister so as to pacify and address the concerns of his parliamentary colleagues.

The project was implemented in 2007 and the first cohort to undertake it submitted their assessed work in April 2008, graduating later that year. The assessments and positive student feedback that accompanied the project mean that it has operated again in subsequent academic years, along the same lines as in the first iteration. The first outcome of the project was that students were clearly intrigued, engaged, and motivated by this atypical research and assessment activity. They enjoyed the podcasts, responded well to the direction they were given, and appreciated the aims and value of the project. While the ‘realism’ involved was not so realistic that the students were actually misled or deceived as to the nature of the project, they did enter into the ‘role-play’ spirit of the project, communicating with the ‘Minister’ directly via email and presenting their assessed work in formal report style, attaching covering memos and writing to/for their intended audience.

The standard of the reports received was very good, with many achieving high marks and the average mark on the assessed work increasing to 62.8 per cent from 61.8 per cent the previous year. In particular, performance in relation to the specific learning outcome of ‘applying theoretical criminological concepts to practical issues within the field of crime, law and social control’ was considerably improved in the opinions of the marking. The reports demonstrated that the students had developed the capacity to draw clear links between conceptual and theoretical frameworks, and practice-based policy outcomes, and utilise the former to effectively justify and support the latter. Students had effectively digested and assessed the numerous source materials involved in the project, had read widely and independently to find relevant material relating to the policy choices, had considered the problems of implementation and likely effectiveness when writing their answers, and had managed to make their proposals theoretically consistent and principled.

The second key result to highlight is that the improvements in student capacity to perform the task of linking research to practice appeared to carry over into the examination as well as the assessed work. By engaging in research which was focused on delivering a set of specific outcomes, the students had developed a more focused approach to writing and presenting issues; the ability to present proposals clearly and concisely, and to justify decisions convincingly, constitutes a transferable academic skill that students can use and apply in future assessment and learning activities. The exam answers were more rounded, more effective at linking parts of the module together, and demonstrated a much clearer consciousness of the ways in which theory and policy can intersect. The lessons from the assessed work had been learned and retained, and the students also demonstrated a much-enhanced awareness of the general politics of lawmaking within the criminal justice system, arguing effectively about the need for government policy to be informed by research and evidence. As well as becoming better-performing students, Project Panacea had made them more considered and aware as criminologists as well.

By utilising the virtual learning environment and a range of online communication methods, the client-focused and ‘real-life’ context and the ‘problematised’ subject matter that are fundamental to an EBL project were quickly and easily incorporated

While some small details of the project (such as the relative costs of items, and the guidance given on what is expected in terms of a ‘report style’ in writing the assessed work) will be reviewed and altered in future, the feedback and results suggest that it is worth retaining and developing further. The intention in the first instance is to identify ways of expanding the scope of this project to more directly address some of the other module learning outcomes, such as the development of the ability to appraise established and accepted public/political notions of crime and crime control, perhaps by tying an exam question to the project and requiring students to critically evaluate and respond to ‘media’ criticism of their Project Panacea report as a form of pre-seen question, thereby demonstrating an understanding of how the politics of law and order is socially constructed. Integrating the project more fully into the module assessment might also potentially involve moving towards an open-book exam assessment that utilises some of the additional skills that it has enhanced, such as the ability to evaluate materials and conduct independent research in order to fulfil a specific brief and produce a required output. In addition, because the project focuses on non-vocational research activities, and is not directly engaged with simulating the formal strictures of the world of practice, the skills learned via enquiry-based learning are more research-oriented than practice-oriented in nature, and so are perhaps more transferable that might otherwise be the case.

Lastly, the main conclusion for this paper should be a more general one; that problem-based learning approaches can offer something substantial and valuable to a legal curriculum, and can assist teachers in achieving specific targeted outcomes within their modules. While there are very many legal questions to which a ‘correct’ answer exists, there are very many more where it does not; in these cases, lawyers and students have to exercise informed judgements based on their substantive knowledge and personal outlook on an issue. Encouraging this sort of autonomy and inculcating ways of making good-quality judgements, whether we agree with the outcomes reached or not, is something that law schools should aim to do; EBL provides a way of doing this.