Over at TaxProf, Dean Caron reports on a University of Minnesota study that found that students who were randomly assigned to 1L sections that had a class with individualized, formative assessments performed better in their other courses than those who did not.  Daniel Schwarcz and Dion Farganis authored the study, which appears in the Journal of Legal Education.

From the overview section of the study:

The natural experiment arises from the assignment of first-year law students to one of several “sections,” each of which is taught by a common slate of professors. A random subset of these professors provides students with individualized feedback other than their final grades. Meanwhile, students in two different sections are occasionally grouped together in a “double- section” first-year class. We find that in these double-section classes, students in sections that have previously or concurrently had a professor who provides individualized feedback consistently outperform students in sections that have not received any such feedback. The effect is both statistically significant and hardly trivial in magnitude, approaching about one-third of a grade increment after controlling for students’ LSAT scores, undergraduate GPA, gender, race, and country of birth. This effect corresponds to a 3.7-point increase in students’ LSAT scores in our model. Additionally, the positive impact of feedback is stronger among students whose combined LSAT score and undergraduate GPA fall below the median at the University of Minnesota Law School.

What’s particularly interesting is how this study came about. Minnesota’s use of “double sections” created a natural control group to compare students who previously had formative assessment with those who did not.

The results should come as no surprise. Intuitively, students who practice and get feedback on a new skills should outperform students who do not. This study advances the literature by providing empirical evidence for this point in a law school context. The study is also significant because it shows that individualized, formative assessment in one class can benefit those students in their other classes.

There are policy implications from this study. Should associate deans assign professors who practice formative assessment evenly across 1L sections so that all students benefit? Should all classes be required to have individualized, formative assessments? What resources are needed to promote greater use of formative assessments—smaller sections and  teaching assistants, for example?