Giving law students substantive feedback on their classroom performance before they take a final exam boosts their grades in other classes, according to a new draft paper by University of Minnesota Law School professor Daniel Schwarcz and law student Dion Farganis, who also happens to be a former Elon University political science professor.
The pair looked at the grades earned by Minnesota law students in double sections of core first-year courses in which half the class previously received formative feedback from a professor in a different course, and half received no such feedback elsewhere. The students who had received feedback in an earlier course consistently outperformed their double-section classmates.
