Title: Attitudes of First Year Law Students to their Learning and their Effects on Wellbeing (with Professor Alex Steel)
Year: 2018
Project Overview: Attitudes of students to their education are an important indicator of how they are likely to respond to particular methods of teaching. They can also be a strong indicator of when they feel empowered and disempowered and how the think about their social and educational connections including friends, teachers, employers and so on. In 2005-7 Tani and Vines conducted a survey of attitudes to education which established that law students were more likely to be doing their degree because other people wanted them to, were more driven by marks than other cohorts, were more likely to see their friends as possibly useful for professional reasons and more likely to see their employers as not interested in their values so much as their marks: ‘Law Students Attitudes to education: a pointer to depression in the legal academy and the profession?’ (2009) 19 (1) Legal Education Review 3-39. The attitudes students demonstrate were analysed in the light of factors which are considered to be connected to depression and anxiety – in particular a sense of autonomy, their level of social connectedness and their level of competitiveness. This project aims to re-survey law students to determine what, if anything, has changed.
Revisiting Student Attitudes to Legal Education
Professor Prue Vines and Professor Alex Steel, UNSW Law
Introduction: In 2009 Tani and Vines (Tani & Vines, 2009) reported on a 2005 survey which examined students’ attitudes to education and compared those across the University by Faculty. In 2014 Steel and Huggins (Steel & Huggins, 2016) reported on a 2012 survey examining law student’s engagement and lifestyle pressures. In 2018 Steel and Vines have re-administered the 2005 survey (and added selected questions from the 2012 survey) and are considering how students’ attitudes to education may have changed and whether it changes throughout a law degree. In a first for legal education, students have been surveyed in the first weeks of their degree allowing an insight into students’ initial beliefs and attitudes to university. A second survey of later year students will provide a counterpoint to the views of beginning students.
Theoretical Background: The knowledge that lawyers are disproportionately affected by depression and anxiety compared with the rest of the community continues to confound legal educators who have difficulty determining what to do about it. This study seeks to determine the extent to which students’ attitudes may affect depression and anxiety by considering their attitudes in terms of whether they demonstrate autonomy and internal motivation or external motivation and lack of social connection. These factors are derived from the extensive psychological literature on factors contributing to depression.
Aims: The aim is to develop an understanding of law students’ attitudes to their legal education as a way of assisting our understanding of how students are likely to respond to particular methods of teaching and whether particular methods of teaching might aggravate or alleviate any tendency to depression or anxiety, and whether student behaviour outside of the classroom may be a factor. The survey will also provide insights into the intrinsic and extrinsic motivators of student behaviour, and the external life factors that affect that motivation.
Progress / Outcomes / Next steps: We have presented the initial results of our survey of first year students at a symposium on wellbeing of lawyers in a changing world. We are still collecting data from later year students and will analyse this data and then present it at a range of education forums and back to the students. The results will then be worked up into a number of peer-reviewed publications. Outcomes will be presented to the Law Faculty and UNSW to assist with enhancing student learning.
References
Steel, A., & Huggins, A. (2016). Law Student Lifestyle Pressures. In J. Duffy, R. Field, & C. James (Eds.), Promoting Law Student and Lawyer Well-Being in Australia and Beyond. Ashgate.
Tani, M., & Vines, P. (2009). Law Students’ Attitudes to Education: Pointers to Depression in the Legal Academy and the Profession. Legal Education Review, 19, 3–40.
