Where to Now? The 2002 Australian Research Skills Training Survey

Extract:The skills perceived as being required of lawyers in practice have always constituted a part of all courses offered in the Law School at Bond University. Skills specifically identified include: advocacy, writing, negotiation/alternative dispute resolution, interviewing and library research skills. Nevertheless, while library skills instruction has always been part of the "Introduction to Law" course at Bond, it is only since term 1, 1992 that it has been offered systematically and in a structured fashion. Since that time, with the encouragement, support and advice of some members of the academic staff, Law Library staff have played a direct role in both the planning and delivery of the library skills programme.

germanlawjournal.com

The priority given to the development of research skills during doctrinal legal education often neglects the importance of equipping PhD students with the pedagogical skills necessary to fulfill their important educational role as academics. Thus, in many instances there is a significant gap in the requisite skill base that PhD students acquire when they complete their doctrinal education. This paper outlines a first step that has been taken to address this deficiency in postgraduate legal education in Ireland. The PhD community of the University College Dublin (UCD) School of Law convened an internal Syllabus Design Workshop in April 2010 in order to provide doctrinal students with an opportunity to design a university module and to explore the issues which arise in undertaking such an exercise. The first part of this paper outlines how the workshop was conceived and convened, and provides an account of the considerations that each student had to take into account in the design of a syllabus. From here, we address the content of the workshop and reflect upon some of the important issues which were raised. Finally, we offer a number of recommendations in relation to the development of doctrinal students as future educators. By highlighting the importance of uniting research and teaching, it is

The priority given to the development of research skills during doctrinal legal education often neglects the importance of equipping PhD students with the pedagogical skills necessary to fulfill their important educational role as academics. Thus, in many instances there is a significant gap in the requisite skill base that PhD students acquire when they complete their doctrinal education. This paper outlines a first step that has been taken to address this deficiency in postgraduate legal education in Ireland. The PhD community of the University College Dublin (UCD) School of Law convened an internal Syllabus Design Workshop in April 2010 in order to provide doctrinal students with an opportunity to design a university module and to explore the issues which arise in undertaking such an exercise. The first part of this paper outlines how the workshop was conceived and convened, and provides an account of the considerations that each student had to take into account in the design of a syllabus. From here, we address the content of the workshop and reflect upon some of the important issues which were raised. Finally, we offer a number of recommendations in relation to the development of doctrinal students as future educators. By highlighting the importance of uniting research and teaching, it is hoped that this paper will contribute to postgraduate legal education in Ireland,and also internationally.

This paper argues that the forces of globalisation and the forecasts of an increasingly cosmopolitan professional future for law graduates, increase the importance of legal research training for the new generation of ‘transnational lawyers’. The contextual issues driving change in the Australian legal education sector, including Australian government interest in fostering research quality, the effects of extensive take-up of information technology in the higher education sector, the growth of trade in professional legal services, and policies aimed at internationalising the legal curriculum all point to a need for more extensive jurisdictional coverage within the legal research education framework. These factors support the need for expanded legal research and communication training at the undergraduate level, together with enhanced offerings at the postgraduate level. First year legal research units have traditionally focussed on inculcating basic research skills. These have ensure...

Canadian Law Library Review, 2018

The article presents the results of a review of professional and scholarly literature published on the subject of legal research and government/legal information instruction between 2000–2018. The goal of the review was to present a comprehensive picture of theoretical and conceptual approaches to pedagogy, as well as teaching techniques, methods, and tools used by law librarians in legal research instruction and information science faculty in government/ legal information courses. The review revealed a significant gap in the state of knowledge on the subject that needs to be addressed by future research. L'article présente les résultats d'un examen d'ouvrages spécialisés et scientifiques, portant sur la recherche juridique et l'enseignement lié à l'information gouvernementale et juridique, qui ont été publiés entre 2000 et 2018. Cet examen a pour but de présenter un tableau complet des approches théoriques et conceptuelles de la pédagogie ainsi que des techniques, des méthodes et des outils pédagogiques utilisés par les bibliothécaires de droit dans l'enseignement de la recherche juridique et par les facultés des sciences de l'information dans les cours d'information gouvernementale et juridique. L'examen a révélé d'importantes lacunes dans l'état des connaissances sur le sujet qui doivent être examinées dans de futures recherches.

2019

The paper (I) outlines the nature and extent of the dissatisfaction with legal research instruction and demonstrates that the problem predates computer-assisted legal research, (II) presents the history of the debate (focusing on a heated exchange between advocates of a "process-oriented" approach and proponents of the traditional, "bibliographic" methods), and (III) presents the requisite elements of a satisfactory pedagogical model, discussing various issues surrounding each of these elements.In part III, the paper proposes that a complete pedagogical model requires (A) an identifiable and fully understood objective in teaching legal research (which objective must distinguish between the kinds of research done by attorneys, scholars, and librarians), (B) a theory and understanding of the nature of legal source materials, (C) a theory of mathetics, or the nature of students and how they learn (with emphasis upon the provision of conceptual models for internalizi...

2003

Abstract The paper (I) outlines the nature and extent of the dissatisfaction with legal research instruction and demonstrates that the problem predates computer-assisted legal research,(II) presents the history of the debate (focusing on a heated exchange between advocates of a “process-oriented” approach and proponents of the traditional,“bibliographic” methods), and (III) presents the requisite elements of a satisfactory pedagogical model, discussing various issues surrounding each of these elements.

Legal Education Review

Trowler and Wareham stress the need for universities to identify university-wide and academic groupings, asking 'what are the predominant ideological orientations to research and to teaching and learning in this university context and how would they have to be changed in order to enhance the teaching-research nexus?'. 8 Ibid. Looking at the literature, they found institutional variation 'in delivering the nexus'. University teaching and research strategies need to articulate the link.

2012

This report surveys the current state of research assessment in the discipline of law in Australia. Its purpose is to document what is already known in light of the discipline’s participation in government-led research performance assessment initiatives from 2006 to 2011 and to draw out the challenges in assessing research quality that Law faces in the future. The report is in four parts, which, combined, provide a clearer empirical foundation for assessing existing research areas and publication opportunities for legal researchers. Part One: Assessing Law Outputs, explains the Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) in relation to law. Part Two: Research Assessment Codes, evaluates the fit of FOR codes with current legal research areas, making recommendations for appropriate accommodation of several new research specializations to provide a clearer picture of the diversity of legal research and assist in assignment of grant assessors. Part Three: Specialist Law Journal Ra...

The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher, 2016

Research literacy (RL) training for higher degree research (HDR) students has been reduced to information technology focus by librarians and as writing practice in research supervision which is an 'underdress' for the issue. This paper argues that holistic research literacy training support should be provided to HDR students, especially those from Asia, being regarded as having serious plagiarism problem in their research study. A three-step framework that covers technological searching and locating, accurate understanding and interpretation, and critical evaluation and synthesis of information was developed and examined in this study. Two cohorts of Asian HDR students enrolled in an Australian university were involved through a parallel group, pre-post test design. One group progressed with 'supervision-as-usual' (SAU), whilst the other received SAU plus formal research literacy workshops. Supplementary data were also collected from the intervention cohort through focus group interviews. Data reveal that an early stage of intervention, using the holistic RL framework developed in this research, can largely improve students' skills with technological searching and locating of information. Data also indicate that students also improved in the aspects of interpreting and synthesising information but this improvement was not as great. This is partly due to their use of English as the second language. This study suggests that language elements should be integrated into the RL framework for students with English as the second language.

Libri, 2010

Although higher education (HE) libraries have given increasing attention to information literacy, the information literacy requirements of researchers have been relatively neglected. This paper reports on the findings of a national survey on the training of postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers in the UK, focusing on the information literacy training provided by academic libraries, in the context of generic research skills training programmes provided by HE institutions. Significant differences between librarianled and centrally provided training are highlighted as well as variation in the breadth of information literacy training provided. Key issues in training provision in this area are identified, and options for developing information literacy support for researchers are discussed.

The purpose of this submission is to draw the committee's attention to a research study I conducted at Queensland University of Technology in 2006/7 to describe and benchmark the university's research-only staff human resourcing, including employment, research capabilities, and professional development, and to make strategic recommendations regarding research-only staff recruitment, employment, retention and development.

Chicago Kent Law Review, 1998

CHICAGO-KENT LAW REVIEW Almost all had tenure. 8 I included the entire population in the study, rather than sampling population members. 9 These professors have established their scholarly reputations and teaching credentials, allowing examination of any relationship between these two academic tasks. Yet the population is junior enough to represent new trends in the legal academy. Probing the relationship between teaching and research in this junior population also allowed me to search for any negative association in a context where it might be most visible; previous scholars have hypothesized that any negative correlation between teaching and research would be most pronounced during the early years, when professors are learning to balance those two tasks. 10 B. Dependent Variables: Primary Measures of Teaching and Research Excellent teaching and research take many forms, and many of those forms are difficult to quantify. For this study, I did not attempt to analyze all aspects of excellent instruction or scholarship. Instead, I selected three measures of scholarship and two of teaching that indicate different types of success in those endeavors. By analyzing associations among these variables, as well as among these primary nal citations in both Shepard's Law Review Citations and the Social Science Citation Index. See id. at 786. For a full description of their method, see id. at 786-92. The top-20 journals, according to the Lindgren and Seltzer list, are the

Research Training in Australia. In S. Marginson (Ed.), Tertiary Education Policy in Australia., 2013

Research training in Australia is central to building and sustaining the national capacity for innovation. The key policy challenge for research education is to achieve the right balance of resourcing and incentives, where quality outcomes are supported in a sustainable way. The current policy environment around research training in Australia is characterised by a convergence of two high-level policy initiatives: the development of a national strategy for building Australia’s research workforce capacity, and a system-level shift in the way the Federal Government regulates higher education and assures quality. This chapter focuses on the intersection of these two initiatives, and how this informs research training policy and practice in Australia.