ALT Annual Conference Speaker Abstracts

Workshops

Workshops 1 - Session A

World Café Workshop: Promising Pedagogy – Choose Your Own Adventure: Encouraging Students’ Capacity for Integrative Reflective Practice Dr Michele Leering How can law teachers build students’ capacity for multi-faceted reflective practice as a professional competency? What is the change we seek through introducing a “pedagogy of reflection?” What opportunities, catalysts and methods best nurture this change? In an informal and engaging atmosphere, this interactive WORLD CAFÉ & OPEN SPACE style workshop is designed to support law teachers sharing their curiosity, pedagogical experience/expertise and learning from each other. We will focus on how to encourage one or more of the domains of integrative reflective practice as conceptualized for law. These include the conventional and instrumental efforts to reflect on learning/practice in the Schönian tradition, as well as the more transformative modalities evoked by critical, self-, integrative, and collective reflection. We also hope for space to discuss challenges and fears, and interest in crowd-sourcing an international publication on promising practices for building law students’ competence.

Workshops 1 - Session C

Making MCTs Work: A Reflection on the use of MCTs in today’s Legal Education Becca Crump, Lee Price, and Maria Keyse, Cardiff University

With MCTs being used by all the legal regulators in their centrally set assessments it is becoming increasingly important to give students exposure to these kinds of assessments. Are MCTs, however, an appropriate form of assessment for use in higher education, do they adequately assess across the grade boundaries and in the face of the increasing presence of artificial intelligence will MCTs become obsolete? Linking to the themes of skills and employability, use of technology, and the training of future lawyers. The use of multiple-choice and single-best-answer questions (‘MCTs’) in Higher Education assessments is growing. MCTs have been used in professional exams in many sectors, such as healthcare and law, for some time and are now becoming more established as a form of undergraduate assessment. The advantages of using MCTs are obvious; they allow breadth of syllabus coverage, are proven to be a very reliable form of assessment and of course are very simple to mark and so can be especially attractive for use in large cohorts. There are, however, lots of misconceptions and questions to be asked surrounding MCTs as a form of summative assessment: Do they test high order learning? Are they appropriate in for an academic programme? And can they be used to assess across the grade boundaries and differentiate adequately between student abilities? The answer to all these questions is yes, but only where the questions are well designed, which is difficult to achieve. We will be considering how to design reliable and rigorous MCTs, and how to incorporate them as part of an overall assessment strategy.

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