oxford law - the faculty and its members : sandra meredith

Sandra Meredith teaches the undergraduate Legal Research Skills Programme, and provides IT and research support to staff and students generally. She is co-editor of OSCOLA, the legal citation guide, and develops and supports OSCOLA styles for Endnote and other bibliographic software. She is the administrator for the Oxford Legal Research Paper Series on SSRN and for Weblearn. Sandy is also involved in the Course in Legal Research Method, the Learning and Teaching in Law seminars, and various other endeavours in the Faculty. Before joining the Law Faculty, she worked as a Learning Technology Support Officer at Oxford Brookes, and as an Educational Developer in the School of Nursing at LaTrobe University in Melbourne, Australia. She has an MA in Education.

Subject groups : Legal Research Skills (undergraduate) : Legal Research Method : Postgraduate Induction

URL: http://ssrn.com/abstract=928428

Abstract: Abstract: This paper reports on a case study of a stand-alone legal research skills programme in the Oxford University Law Faculty. The research methodology involved interviews, surveys and observation of students at two points in 2004 and 2006. The study finds that students increasingly use networked computers as their primary information source, with most students using legal databases to find cases, statutes and articles on their reading lists. Students' skills are better developed in citation searching than in subject searching and in using the more complex features of databases. Formative assessment, represented in 'getting through the reading list' for weekly tutorials and essays, is the crucial factor in providing opportunities for students to develop citation searching skills. The study also found that students handle different resources differently, being more likely to read law reports on the computer screen than articles, and using electronic law reports as part of a computer-based study strategy. The report describes how students use the internet to search for materials when writing essays, and considers the question of plagiarism. It recommends that students should be given successive opportunities to do research as part of their everyday study to enable them to develop better research skills and practices.