Enquiring Minds and the Role of Information Literacy in the Design, Management and Assessment of Student Research Tasks

This chapter was based on workshop papers presented in seminars organised by the editors and members of the Staffordshire University Information Literacy Community of Practice (SUILCoP). SUILCoP includes HE lecturers as well as information specialists from fifty or so participating universities and organisations. It also develops several of the themes explored in an earlier article co-authored for the journal Legal Information Management (Cambridge University Press)in 2010 which was produced with the book's editors, Geoff Walton and Alison Pope. The chapter (chapter 5) discusses approaches to embedding Information Literacy requirements in Law programmes and modules with a view to improving the quality of research-based assessments, particularly small-group projects and individual dissertations and assignments.
The chapter considers the need for HE providers delivering Law programmes to develop better, more effective strategies in order to meet QAA benchmark requirements, including the need for Law students who are about to graduate to be operating at the 'boundaries of knowledge' in the discipline, and to have the research and research-related skills required to be able to work effectively in the legal services market. Among other things, it argues that qualitative improvements in student research require the formal incorporation of IL requirements (or US style 'standards') in assessments' design, and when precribing learning outcomes. Pre-completion guidance also needs to be provided at key stages in the research and writing cycle if discernible improvements are to be made. This is well understood in many US law schools' research and writing skills programmes, as the author observed during his visiting lecturing work at the College of Law, Idaho University. That experience has been helping to inform new approaches to research task-setting, support, and assessment at Staffordshire University - most notably in the case of a number of Level 6/final year Law programmes where project work features strongly in the curriculum (for example in CPE Graduate Conversion Course extended assignments, and LLB Level 6 dissertations). The article draws on the existing literature on IL, particularly in the areas of guidance and assessment.