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Rawson, Shirley L; Tyree, Alan L --- "Fred Keller Goes to Law School" [1991] LegEdRev 12; (1990-91) 2(1) Legal Education Review 253

[*] Faculty of Law, University of Sydney.

© 1991. (199B91) 2 Legal Educ Review 253.

[1] The “axiom” is being questioned by some teachers. For example, J Morgan, The Socratic Method: Silencing Cooperation (1989) 1 Legal Educ Rev 151.

[2] “Mastery learning” is the term used by BS Bloom, Human Characteristics and School Learning (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976).

[3] For a fuller discussion of behavioural objectives, see JS Vargas, Writing Worthwhile Behavioural Objectives (New York: Harper Row, 1972). See also J Heywood, Assessment in Higher Education (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1989).

[4] For a discussion of criterion-referenced and non-referenced examining procedures, see J Heywood, Assessment in Higher Education, 2nd edn (New York: Wiley, 1989). See also RL Ebel and DA Frisbie, Essentials of Educational Measurement, 4th edn (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1986).

[5] CR Clark, TR Guskey and JS Benninga, The Effectiveness of Mastery Learning Strategies in Undergraduate Education Courses (1983) 76 J Educ Research 210.

[6] For a thorough introduction to the Keller Plan, see FS Keller, and JG Sherman, The Keller Plan Handbook (Menlo Park, California: WA Benjamin Inc, 1974).

[7] See FS Keller, Good-Bye Teacher … (1968) J of Applied Behaviour Analysis 79–89, 83.

[8] Id.

[9] For some typical examples, see PS Allen, Developing a Remedial Keller- Man Course (1978) 3 Higher Educ 213; PL Schwartz, A Controlled Trial of Teaching Clinical Biochemistry by a Keller Plan (1980) 55 J of Medical Educ 1013; W Ferguson, Personalized Instruction in Business Education (1981) 50 J of Experimental Educ 9.

[10] Keller & Sherman, supra note 6, at 78 recommend four separate tests for each unit. We were able to reduce this load somewhat using the computer examining system described below.

[11] For example, in PS Men supra note 9, self-instruction was emphasised. In PL Schwartz, supra note 9, from a class of 196 medical students 30 were randomly chosen in a biochemistry course to study by the Keller Plan and the rest were used as a control group. Schwartz concentrated on the final examination results of these groups in his paper.

[12] Kulik, Kulik and Cohen, A Meta-Analysis of Outcome Studies of Keller’s Personalized System of Instruction (1979) 34 American Psychologist 307.

[13] Id at 311,317.

[14] Id at 313,317.

[15] Id at 317–318.

[16] See Morgan, supra note 1, and the articles cited there.

[17] It may seem strange that there is no intellectual property component in such a course. It is strange, but is explained by a desire to avoid “overlap” with longer-established courses.

[18] Actually a different but equivalent test. See the discussion on examination by computer infra at 260.

[19] See infra at 268–269 for a discussion of distribution of grades.

[20] The DataLex Project is a pint research project managed by Alan Tyree of the University of Sydney, Graham Greenleaf of the University of New South Wales and Andrew Mowbray of the University of Technology, Sydney. The major activities of the Project have been in legal artificial intelligence and legal information retrieval.

[21] These are not problems which are unique to the computer examination system. By using human proctors, however, the problems can be caught at marking time, and so may be less serious.

[22] We expect to have preliminary results of the project by the time that this appears in print. The SAGES system uses a combination of parsing algorithms and statistical methods to classify an answer.

[23] Allen, supra note 9, at 213.

[24] The computer lab at the Law School has two Honeywell Superteam computers. These are connected to 28 IBM-compatible machines each with their own 30mb hard disk. The lab is used for teaching legal information retrieval using the DataLex AIRS software, for student word processing and a variety of other projects

[25] We are developing a PC based examination system which will hold questions in an encrypted form. Contact the authors for further information.

[26] For example, see PJ Stoward, Self-Instruction Through Reading: The Keller Plan (1976) 10 Medical Educ 316 at 325.

[27] Although we were able to introduce self and peer assessment of written essays: see SL Rawson and AL Tyree, Self and Peer Assessment In Legal Education [1989] LegEdRev 11; (1989) 1 Legal Educ Rev 135.

[28] Keller & Sherman, supra note 6 at 75.

[29] See D Munro, Quality Distance Education = Computer Based Feedback + Electronic Mail in J Barrett & J Hedberg, (eds) Using Computers Intelligently in Tertiary Education, Papers presented to the Australian Society for Computers in Learning, (Sydney, 29 November-3 December 1987) at 147–152.