[Saltassessmentworkinggroup] Help pls - assessment study design ?s

[Michael Schwartz]

Andi,


Your work is awesome!  Here are my comments.



I agree wholeheartedly with point #1.


On #2, I think you should use the same survey to see if the changes you made changed students' experience in your class.


On #3, if you control for LSAT and law school gpa, I don't see a problem.  There will always be differences unless you set up an inauthentic experiment, which would then introduce different issues.


On #4, I have a few comments: 
- If you still don't see any differences, one possibility may be the type of feedback you are giving.  Paula Manning of Whittier gave a very helpful presentation at the Assessment Conference in Denver addressing best practices in feedback.  She had pretty interesting data suggesting that, when she changed the type of feedback she gave, student performance soared.  Her work builds on the body of scholarship on feedback in the legal writing community.
- A potentially confounding factor may be self-efficacy.  I think there's reason to believe many students' self-efficacy diminishes after their first year in law school.  Students may be more likely to learn from feedback if they believe they can.  If you administered a self-efficacy measure and controlled for that factor, you might eliminate some noise in your data.


~Mike
Professor Michael Hunter Schwartz
Co-Director, Institute for Law Teaching and Learning
Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Development
Washburn University School of Law
1700 SW College Ave.
Topeka, KS 66621
785  670-1666
michael.schwartz at washburn.edu 



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