Teaching a historical context in a first-year ‘Introduction to private law’ course: the effects of teaching approaches and a learning environment on students’ learning

Law students in the Netherlands tend to focus on the current state of the law. Students focus on what they believe will later be legal practice, and this often leads to a surface approach to legal matters among students, especially with regard to legal history. The question arises how this surface approach can be turned into a deep approach to learning and, in that respect, what influence teaching has on the level of students’ learning. In this study we investigated whether a new teaching approach as to the historical context of law will stimulate deep learning. This study concentrates on an intervention in the teaching materials and the teaching methods of a first-year course in law, Introduction to Private Law: Law of Obligations (ca. 700 students), where an integral approach to skills, (legal) content and historical context (legal history and Roman law) was offered. The effects of this intervention on students’ learning were studied by means of questionnaires. The results of the student survey (at the beginning and at the end of the course) were compared and related to the approaches taken by teachers, and compared to the exam results and in particular the questions on the historical context. With regard to the educational design, on average students thought – compared with the two previous courses in the first year of the Law curriculum – that it helped
slightly better in gaining an insight into the working of law in context. Nevertheless, a significant decrease in the deep approach occurred when comparing post- with pre-course scores. When looking at the role of the teacher, it has been shown that the effect of teachers’ approaches on students’ approaches was not significant, as a deep approach at the starting point was dominant.