Wong, Y J --- "Harnessing the Potential of Problem-based Learning in Legal Education" [2004] LegEdDig 15; (2004) 12(3) Legal Education Digest 21

Harnessing the Potential of Problem-based Learning in Legal Education

Y J Wong

[2004] LegEdDig 15; (2004) 12(3) Legal Education Digest 21

37 Law Teacher 2, 2003, pp 157–169

Legal education has been dominated by an obsession to ‘know the law’. The tendency is to exclude the relevance of all other forms of non-legal experiences from the process of learning the law. This creates an image of legal education as a totally self-contained experience.

A second concern relates to the way law is taught and learnt in law schools. Traditional law school teaching emphasises learning the law rather than learning how to learn the law. The law is taught according to neat, sequential topics and information learnt in one semester or a year is applied in three-hour examinations. The problem with such an educational approach is that it does not adequately prepare students for legal practice in the real world.

Unlike conventional teaching, the starting point for learning in problem-based learning (PBL) is a problem which requires students to research, select, analyse and apply information to solve the problem. PBL problems can be contrasted with problems used in traditional legal education, which can be described as ‘exercises’. In an exercise, the student applies acquired knowledge to solving it, having already learnt the required rules for this purpose, so that the effort ahead involves only time and care in working through the exercise.

A true problem is something which the student has never seen before and throws up no clear pathways to a solution. Students use the problem to direct their learning of the law. In PBL the process of learning is as important as the content of learning. It helps students to appreciate the open-textured and indeterminate nature of law and to view the law as a social phenomenon, placing law in its social context.

The principles essential to a PBL curriculum are the following: students should be responsible for their own learning; the problem is the starting point for learning new knowledge; the lecturer’s role is to facilitate students’ thinking, rather than to teach the students; students should engage in collaborative learning; students should engage in reflective thinking; and students should learn through a problem-solving process.

Typically, the following categories of learning objectives are found in law subjects that use PBL: (1) those relating to the substantive content of the subject; (2) those relating to core legal skills, which are case-reading skills, statutory interpretation skills, legal research skills, legal opinion writing skills, skills in drafting legal documents, and interpretative skills; and (3) those relating to generic process skills, such as journal writing, peer teaching and peer feedback.

In traditional law curricula, assessment typically focuses on students’ understanding and application of the substantive law. The assessment methods usually involve assignments, tests and examinations. In a PBL law curriculum the assessment goals are broader and the assessment methods more varied. For example, for the Temasek Polytechnic’s (TP) Diploma in Law and Management program in Singapore the following assessment structure was adopted for Criminal Law: the examination 60 percent; a PBL problem, the ‘deliverable’ being a written legal opinion, 15 percent; peer teaching 15 percent, and peer feedback 10 percent.

In a typical law subject the problem may take the form of a long hypothetical scenario. The art of designing problems is a challenging one. PBL educators often speak about the ill-structured nature of problems. This is a reference to the fact that a good PBL problem should be presented in an authentic manner which stimulates learners to generate multiple hypotheses and integrate different sources of information. Simulating the way problems exist in the working world, problems are presented with gaps in information and no clear-cut solutions. First, the information provided in the problem should simulate the way in which information is presented in the real world and might contain irrelevant or incoherent information and gaps in information. Second, the dynamic nature of law PBL problems is seen in its multi-dimensional nature, reflecting the fact that the problems which clients present often do not fall into neatly defined subject categories but involve overlapping areas of law.

Nevertheless, in designing problems, it is helpful to include things that are familiar to students to ensure that they are able to build on an existing body of knowledge. Learning occurs best when what is being learnt is relevant and meaningful and when the learner is actively engaged in creating his or her own knowledge by connecting what is being learnt to prior knowledge and experience.

The students in the TP law program are taught a specific problem-solving model to guide their learning in PBL: problem identification, problem inquiry, learning issues and goals, research discovery, analysis, peer sharing and discussion, solutions development, reflect and refine, and debrief and summary session. Consistent with the student-centred approach in PBL, students are primary agents for learning in a PBL curriculum with the lecturers being facilitators. The initiative is on students to ask their facilitators questions on any issue relating to their learning process to enable the latter to foster critical thinking in students.

There has been no known empirical research comparing a PBL law curriculum with a traditional law curriculum. Future research should compare the two types of curricula on various outcome measures. Researchers might want to explore whether students who learn a law subject via PBL have superior problem-solving skills and greater intrinsic interest in the subject, compared to students in the traditional system.

The PBL approach used in the Criminal Law curriculum of the TP law program was a hybrid model, rather than a ‘pure PBL model’. The potential pitfall of a hybrid model is that it can be disconcerting for students to constantly ‘shift gears’ between the traditional teaching approach and self-directed learning approach in PBL. At this point, it is not known if students would have been better served if a ‘pure PBL model’ with no examinations, lectures and tutorials was adopted. Future research should examine which models of PBL are best suited for different types of legal education.