This program offers teaching tools for helping the “Twitter Generation” of law students extract critical information from legal texts, including client fact documents, statutes, cases, and court documents. Unfortunately, reading comprehension skills have declined in the “age of the screen,” especially given the last decade’s “teach-to-the-test” focus of primary and secondary school education. Even students who arrive at law school with adequate general reading comprehension skills may need help applying those skills contextually to legal documents. Current scholarship dedicated to enhancing reading comprehension in law students suggests that students need to learn to read: (a) critically (i.e., by engaging in a dialogue with the text, and asking questions about what they are reading), and (b) contextually (understanding how a legal text fits into the larger scheme of a case and might be used in other contexts). The program will begin with a short introduction to reading comprehension theory and common reading comprehension problems facing our students, followed by an interactive exercise in which the audience will engage in metacognition to extract fundamental reading comprehension processes. Together, the presenters and audience will highlight common impediments to law students’ critical reading skills, and identify classroom techniques for helping them overcome such hurdles.
Business Meeting at Program Conclusion.