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1 J. Legal Stud. Educ. 1 (1983)

handle is hein.journals/jlse1 and id is 1 raw text is: THE EFFECT ON EXAMINATION PERFORMANCE OF REQUIRING STUDENT PARTICIPATION IN A LEGAL STUDIES CLASS L. Thomas Bowers, Associate Professor of Business Law, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana The activities of teaching, learning and exam- ining in higher education have received remark- ably little attention from experimentalists. The suggestion that belief, however hallowed, stands in need of empirical support is often met with incredulous opposition, and men whose academic work is based upon a rigorous testing of accepted ideas, tend to think it somehow indecent to apply the same standard of inquiry to their own teaching and examining practices. Few university teachers are even aware that many of their instructional problems have already been investigated experimentally, and only a tiny minority take the trouble to acquaint them- selves with the results.1 Since 1925 university teachers have tested the effectiveness of alternative methods of teaching.2 Most of the studies testing teaching methodologies have been performed by teachers of psychology with students enrolled in psychology courses.3 A few studies have compared the effect of different methods of instructing law students4 and legal studies students.5 Nearly all the studies have compared the traditional lecture method6 of teaching with a method requiring greater student involvement in the education process. Such methods incorporating greater student involvement include problem solving7 and computer-assisted teaching.8 The effectiveness of the methods has been measured by the students' performance on examinations and quizzes, most of which were devoted solely to objective questions.9 Surprisingly, studies rarely found significant differences between alternative teaching methodologies as measured by examination perfor- mance.10 The conclusion to be drawn from the literature is that it is not generally demonstrable that one method is superior to another.'1 For nearly six decades researchers have attempted to contrast face-to-face methods of teaching experimentally. The results of this research are clear and unequiv- ocal -- no particular method of teaching is measur- ably to be preferred over another when evaluated by

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