Scholarship Spotlight: “What Did They Know and When Did They Know it? Pretesting and Assessing Learning Outcomes” (Jeffrey Harrison – Florida)

How far does the teaching of contract doctrine take students beyond their initial intuitive view of the applicable legal rules? Jeffrey Lynch Harrison of the University of Florida – Levin College of Law recently posted “What Did They Know and When Did They Know it? Pretesting and Assessing Learning Outcomes,” an article that should be of interest to anyone teaching the first-year Contracts course. Here is the abstract:

Abstract

Are legal rules intuitive or, at least, consistent with common sense? In this study, 260 law students at five law schools who had not taken contract law, were presented with eight questions based on specific contracts cases or common contracts issues. They were asked what they felt was the fair or right answer to each question and to formulate the rule they would apply. The purposes of the study were to 1) determine whether contract law is what the untrained person believes it is or should be and 2) experiment with a strategy of pretesting to determine what topics within any course deserve special attention during a semester.

Outside of its classroom implications, Harrison’s article also provides some interesting fodder on the issue of the extent to which legal rules in general are–or must be–dependent on given zones of societal norms. “What Did They Know and When Did They Know it? Pretesting and Assessing Learning Outcomes” is available for SSRN download here.