KIF02151

Sally Kift

Assistant Dean, Teaching and Learning

QUT Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology, AUSTRALIA.

Telephone: +61-7-3864 1098

Facsimile: +61-7-3864 2121

In recent years, Australian higher education generally, and the legal education sector particularly, have been under sustained pressure to adapt to the demands of a changing, discriminating and competitive higher education marketplace. Tertiary legal education has been subjected to intense scrutiny by government, employers, University management, professional bodies, the judiciary, law reform agencies and, not least of all, an extremely diverse student cohort. All stakeholders demand that law faculties should be accountable at every level for the quality and efficacy of the professional education they offer. The result has been that the fundamental orientations of legal curricula have had to be reconsidered. In 2000, the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC), in a major review of the Federal civil justice system cited the American Bar Association's 1992 MacCrate Report, and concluded that legal education should now focus on what lawyers need "to be able to do" (rather than what lawyers "need to know") (ALRC 1999:2.20).

The contemporary dynamics of the tertiary sector have aligned with such calls: universities are now recognising "that there is a need to ensure that graduates have the generic skills desired by employers such as analysis, communication, team-work and leadership skills" (Nelson 2002:9).

These drivers have delivered the opportunity to effect significant structural and philosophical change to core undergraduate law curriculum that may otherwise have been too radical to envision. Contemplating a clean review slate, the QUT Law Faculty has been afforded the luxury of progressing a "whole of course" approach to curriculum redesign. Critically, it has been possible to articulate "up front" the type of graduate practitioner we would desirably wish to produce. While we expect our students to graduate with sound technical knowledge of substantive law content, in more recent times, the challenge has been to inculcate both generic and legally specific skills in a holistic way to advance graduate outcomes. As legal educators, we are answerable to the diversity of stakeholder interests identified above. It is also appropriate therefore to seek out correlation between what it is that we as teachers want for and from our students and what it is that employers value in terms of graduate suitability for the workplace and job preparedness.

The conjunction of these academic and employment aspirations dictate that, while technically competent practitioners are obviously desirable, it is also imperative that graduates are equipped with the skills necessary to be able to use that technical knowledge effectively to succeed and evolve in the workplace. Graduates must therefore be equipped with transferable skills, a commitment to lifelong learning and the ability to work cooperatively and collaboratively with others in a workforce that is diverse and globalised. They must be capable of practising as reflective practitioners in changing and challenging work environments, which will require a skilling in moral and ethical competence so that they may deal with the complexity and ambiguity they will inevitably face. In sum, both academics and employers trust that the "wholly-prepared" graduate will have the necessary ability to integrate experience, information and knowledge to act as a competent professional in a diverse global and technological society.

This paper will detail the formulation of a coherent, incremental and holistic framework that has been designed for the teaching, learning and assessment of both conceptual knowledge and transferable generic and discipline specific skills, in the legal education context.

Specifically, the paper examines:

• The context in which this innovative curriculum framework has been developed to embed graduate capability development in core curriculum;

• The issues regarding the identification of, and the interrelationships between, desirable capabilities and skills (both generic and discipline specific);

• The investigations that led to the formulation of "course objective descriptors" for each of the identified skills, following which a further deconstruction was required to designate appropriate competency levels for the demonstration of staged acquisition of skilled behaviour by students as they progressed through the course;

• The process of mapping skill development onto appropriate units in year levels, to embed capability development within the curriculum.

• How the issue of developing appropriate criteria, tools and assessment tasks has been addressed in this context.

Exemplars from the undergraduate law curriculum will be used to show how graduate capabilities have been embedded and are being assessed incrementally through the course. Finally the paper will look at some of the implications and issues that arise for tertiary education and educators when the academy embraces an explicit capability development approach in embarking on, what is essentially, wholesale curriculum review.

When the QUT Law Faculty undertook a reconceptualisation of the teaching and learning experience offered by its undergraduate law programs, an obvious and crucial starting point was the first year experience of our student cohort. If we could not get this right then the platform upon which any subsequent review was to be constructed would be fatally flawed.

Given that tertiary law in Australia is essentially an undergraduate degree, the prospect of advancing the first year experience to presage student attainment of our vision of the graduate practitioner was, to say the least, a challenging one. Not only did we wish to address the generic issues of first year transition - diversity, the great divide between the expectations of staff and students and the crisis of large classes - we were also committed to providing the first year cohort with a package of teaching and learning opportunities that combined substantive content, theoretical and practical knowledge with the development of certain generic (and some discipline specific) skills; all of this in a legal context to a basic level of competency for all students, regardless of the diversity of their prior background and experience.

In particular, the review for the new first year considered:

• The first year objectives for a modern law program and the consequent redesign of a holistic integrated first year program (eg, issues such as the first year's status as the foundation of the course which requires that certain content and skills be desirably addressed);

• The balance of skills to be inculcated across the first year curriculum;

• How to make explicit to students what was to be achieved in terms of skills development by the end of each unit and also at the end of the year;

• How to change the teaching and learning approaches to ensure that the process of instruction, practice and reflection could be embedded within the new units;

• The redesign of the assessment criteria and methods to facilitate this teaching and learning approach.

This shopping list for the new first year identifies quite clearly that it was never going to be possible to settle immediately to curriculum reform by simply selecting some inalienable, graduate capabilities and append them to a unit or two: such an approach could only ever address part of a very complex whole. Hence it was that first year curriculum review transformed itself into a review for graduate capability. But first year curriculum review could not be done in a "whole of course" vacuum. Just as the placement and assessment of substantive content is carefully considered in line with unit, year and course objectives, so also it was necessary to be deliberately cautious about the placement and assessment of generic (and discipline specific) skills as a "whole of course" exercise. Just as we seek to develop content in an integrated and incremental fashion in core curriculum - building blocks on a basic stable platform of knowledge (which, for undergraduate law, is the whole of the first year) - so also generic skills development should be approached and embedded in an intergrated (both horizontal and vertical) and incremental way. The course objective is to produce a whole (knowledgeable and skilled) graduate package. With respect to any skill, the framework and context (ie, curriculum) in which it is to be developed is critical - how else may the learning objectives for the skill be sensibly determined, implemented and then assessed? To bolt graduate capabilities on to certain units and to consider their assessment in isolation of the whole teaching, learning and assessment objectives of the curriculum is incongruous.

"...the qualities, skills and understandings a university community agrees its students should develop during their time with the institution. These attributes include, but go beyond, the disciplinary expertise or technical knowledge that has traditionally formed the core of most university courses. They are qualities that also prepare graduates as agents for social good in an unknown future." (Bowden, Hart, King, Trigwell and Wells 2000:2)

QUT has developed its own statement of graduate capabilities. In 2002, the Faculty secured a further Large Grant to examine and address the challenges of re-formulating assessment and feedback practices to assure their validity and reliability in this new teaching and learning environment. These two Grants have built on the platform on first year curriculum review for graduate capability development and have focused our attention on the necessity to harness associated assessment and feedback practices to assure the desired educational improvement in graduate outcomes.

The national and international recognition that discipline knowledge is but one of a broader set of competencies that influence the success of graduates in their chosen professions was the impetus for the QUT Law Faculty to apply for Teaching and Learning Development Grants to develop an integrated framework for the teaching and assessment of both conceptual knowledge and transferable skills. It has long been recognised that skills must be embedded within the processes and content of learning to ensure that learning objectives are met. Teaching and learning approaches and assessment methods are also desirably developed and executed in an authentic learning environment.

Therefore, the aim of our curriculum redesign for capability acquisition was to develop these authentic learning environments for students through the adoption of appropriate learning objectives, teaching and learning approaches and assessment methods. In this way, students would be facilitated in their development of both generic and specific (legal professional) skills in conjunction with the ethical and discipline framework they would need to practise as reflective practitioners on graduation. In the past, while universities may have expected their graduates to acquire certain implicit capabilities, the structured development of those capabilities was either non-existent or left to skills based units divorced from the rest of the curriculum. The focus of our curriculum redesign was to ensure that graduate capabilities should be seen as inextricably linked with the learning of disciplinary content in an explicit rather than implicit manner. Thus, students would be equipped to proceed into the workforce with the appropriate level of skills acquisition to enable a seamless transition from the academic to the professional environment. As stated by the Australian Law Reform Commission in 1999:

The first step required us to identify the generic and discipline-specific capabilities required by and of our graduates. This was done using a variety of sources:

• Feedback from employers and graduates, including the 2000 research report of the Evaluation and Investigations Programme (EIP), Higher Education Division of the Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs (DETYA), undertaken by ACNielson Research Services on Employer Satisfaction with Graduate Skills. This latter Report highlighted that, taking into account the relative importance of the skills to employers, the greatest skill deficiencies among new graduates were perceived to be in the areas of creativity and flair, oral business communications and problem solving (EIP DETYA 2000; National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) 2001).

• Surveys produced by various studies conducted by professional bodies; in the discipline of law particularly, the survey produced by the Centre for Legal Education concerning the use of skills by law graduates ("Vignaendra Report") which indicated that the skills most frequently used by law graduates in any type of law related employment were oral and written communication, computer skills, time management and document management. Legally specific skills, whilst rated as important, were not the most frequently used (Vignaendra 1998:39).

• The list of graduate capabilities produced by QUT in its Manual of Policies and Procedures.

• Various international studies; particularly relevant for the discipline of law was the list of core skills and values set out in the American Bar Association's MacCrate Report (1992) though much work has also been done in the UK (Law Discipline Network 1998; UK Centre for Legal Education 1998; UK Centre for Legal Education 1997; Bell 1996; Bell and Johnstone 1998).

The task of identifying the capabilities and the various skills that might go to making up those capabilities was not an easy one. In the end result, the decision was taken to agree on a set of capabilities, the totality of which was considered to adequately describe a desirable graduate practitioner. Rather than then seek to list the various skills (generic and discipline specific) that might go to constituting each of the capabilities separately (as was first attempted and which led to much duplication), the approach taken was to deconstruct the capabilities holistically and to identify sets of generic and/or discipline specific skills that, taken together, go to making up the graduate capabilities. This is explained and exampled further below. Though the capabilities settled on attempt to define desirable qualities, skills and understandings comprehensively at this point in time, it is recognised that the statement cannot be allowed to become frozen. The types of capabilities and skills necessary in the workplace will change over time and the list should be subject to continual review.

The six desirable capabilities of a law graduate, designed to encapsulate broad descriptors of graduate quality and expressed in terms of the abilities a graduate will be expected to possess upon graduation have been determined as follows:

Graduates will possess detailed and comprehensive knowledge of Australian legal principles and statutory regimes, knowledge of legal systems and influences outside Australia, an understanding of the latter's relationship with the Australian legal system and a fundamental knowledge of extra legal factors impinging upon substantive law.

Graduates will possess a sense of community and professional responsibility and will be able to identify and offer appropriate solutions to ethical dilemmas.

Graduates will be able to clearly, appropriately and accurately communicate both orally and in writing having regard to the appropriate language for a variety of contexts.

Graduates will possess critical thinking and problem solving skills, which enable effective analysis, evaluation and creative resolution of legal problems

Graduates will be able to use current technologies and effective strategies for the retrieval, evaluation and creative use of relevant information as a lifelong learner.

Graduates will be able to work both independently and as a productive member of a team, practice critical reflection and creative thinking, be socially responsible and inclusive, and be able to work effectively and sensitively within the global community in continually changing environments.

The next stage in the process was to identify the various skills, and, then, to define the expected levels of achievement for each of those skills as a guide for both students and staff: for students as they progress through the degree and for staff as they design curriculum and related assessment tasks. A Table of Core Skills has been developed and is explained below. As has already been briefly mentioned, it is important to reiterate that many of the skills identified interrelate. Very few generic or discipline specific skills exist in a vacuum: many skills draw upon others to demonstrate effective acquisition of a particular skill (eg, problem solving draws on many of the other skills) while some skills are so fundamental that they permeate the application of nearly every other skill (reflective practice is a good example of the latter). This is essentially why the Law Project Team found it impossible to delineate exhaustively which skills should be assigned to which specific graduate capability. The fact is that generic and discipline specific skills interrelate with each other and also overlap and underpin effective (holistic) skills development and the (ultimate) attainment of the desirable graduate capability package.

The identified list of generic and legally specific skills for incorporation within the course were categorised broadly as:

• Attitudinal skills

• Cognitive skills

• Communication skills

• Relational skills.

To example the interrelationship discussed above as between the capabilities and the generic and discipline specific skills, take the example of the capability, "Ethical Attitude". This capability encompasses (at least) the skills of "ethical values" (from the Attitudinal Skills category) and "discipline and ethical knowledge" (from the Cognitive Skills category). Each of these skills has both generic and discipline specific (ie, legal) applications. The capability (cf skill) "Ethical Attitude" includes that:

1. The graduate is able to value and promote truth, accuracy, honesty, accountability and ethical behaviour.

2. The graduate possesses knowledge of and an understanding of the nature and sources of ethical standards and their enforcement.

3. The graduate recognises and applies possible processes for resolving ethical dilemmas.

But this level of detail is nowhere near sufficient to be of assistance in terms of how the various skills will be developed and assessed. Therefore, each of the identified skills has been further de-constructed in the Table of Core Skills to identify each skill in the following order of detail:

• the broad skill category: from the four categories set out above;

• the specific skills within those categories: from the more detailed shaded table above;

• the course objectives: that is, the level of competency expected of a graduate by the end of his/her course regarding the specific skill; and

• the demonstrated abilities of the graduate for each of the skills: that is, a statement that to meet the (final) course objectives for the specific skill, the graduate will have demonstrated certain abilities.

• Skill Category: Cognitive skills.
  • Particular skill: Problem Solving

    • Course Objective: The graduate is able to develop effective strategies for applying knowledge and solving problems to achieve objectives.

      • Demonstrated Ability: To demonstrate that the graduate has met this objective and has attained this skill on graduation, a student will need to be able to do the following:

• Identify information needed, formulate questions, refine questions through answers, identify issue(s)

• Research and analysis

• Synthesis of research and ability to draw on analogy

• Reflection and review (which may require review of 1-3)

• Articulate possible solutions to problem - where appropriate a creative practical solution should be offered.

At certain, identified stages within the process, a student will need to be assessed on his/her level of attainment. The requirements for assessment and reporting led the Project Team to further break down each skill into three broad levels of progression or development (the Assessment Criteria for Skills in Levels). For each level, the skills need to be mapped onto appropriate core units within the years of the undergraduate curriculum ("appropriate" in the sense that there is thoughtful matching of skill with unit content in which the teaching, learning and assessment of the skill is to be embedded), so that it is clear which units take responsibility for a particular skill's development to which level of attainment. Each level of progression relates broadly to the notion that a student should move, in an incremental way, through various stages of development in the acquisition of skilled behaviour. In the specific terms of the undergraduate (law) degree, this may be represented generally as follows:

• Skill Level 1 - At this level (notionally year 1), the student will be instructed on the theoretical framework for and application of the skill, usually at a generic level. The skill may be practised with guidance and feedback provided. Assessment will usually include a critique of the skill as practised.

• Skill Level 2 - At this level (notionally year 2), a degree of independence is required of the student. This may involve some additional guidance at an advanced level of the skill, an environment in which to practise the skill in a real world legal scenario and feedback to students on their progress. Students will be encouraged to reflect on their performance and on ways in which that performance might be improved. At this level, individually or within a group, a student should be able to complete a task utilising a range of skills in relation to a simple legal matter.

• Skill Level 3 - At this level (notionally years 3 and 4), students should be able to draw on their previous instruction and transfer the use of the skill to a variety of different circumstances and contexts without guidance. Students should be able to adapt and be creative in the ways in which they approach the context for and use of particular skills. Reflection on performance will be a key aspect. At this level, individually or within a group, a student should be able to complete a task for a knowledgeable and critical audience utilising a range of skills in a complex legal matter.

This last deconstruction draws attention to the necessity for there to be objective assessment criteria specified for each level of each skill so that the student's progress towards the ultimate attainment of the skill (as designated by the stated course objective) can be assessed. Fundamental to nominating these levels of progression have been the dual imperatives of:

1. Making explicit for students the incremental path of the skilling process (and thus also providing the opportunity for student reflection on their own development); and

2. Providing staff with the platform on which they can implement the particular assessment strategies in their own units.

This staged assessment of skill development also provides the framework for a reporting procedure that will eventually be utilised for the development of a student capability profile.

Together the two documents - Table of Core Skills and Assessment Criteria for Skills in Levels - encapsulate the taxonomy that has been adopted of skill category, specific skills, course objectives, demonstrated abilities of the graduate for each skill and skill levels (the latter describing generally the incremental levels of skills development and also the undergraduate units which have designated responsibility for each skill as against a particular level of competency acquisition - this last aspect will now be discussed).

The undergraduate law curriculum was then reviewed in its entirety to embed this explicit approach to capability development. Central to the achievement of this objective has been the dual imperatives of integrating the skills within the processes and content of the substantive units and the striking of an appropriate balance as between skills development and content knowledge acquisition.

Skills integration requires both a macro course level approach, to ensure appropriate distribution of skills, and a micro unit level approach that encompasses a review of existing competency levels of students entering the unit, learning objectives, teaching methods and related assessment tasks. Some of the strategies our Faculty has developed to facilitate this mapping exercise include:

• The identification of appropriate units (in terms of content correlation) in which to position the development of the various skills and the planned articulation of those skills with other units throughout the degree;

• A reconsideration of the learning objectives, teaching and learning approaches and assessment methods for each unit to reflect the balance struck between substantive content and skills development;

• A re-assessment of the mode of delivery and the teaching and learning approaches in units so as to achieve authentic learning environments for the development of skills within the course;

• Developing appropriate assessment tools and mechanisms (including identification of criteria and publication of feedback sheets) for assessing competency levels within each of the skills;

• Establishing an appropriate reporting procedure for the students to track their development by documenting skills attainment (at the various levels of competency) through a reflective process that will lead ultimately to the development of a "student capability profile" at a university level.

• Creation and implementation of a staff development model to enhance the staff-as-instructors' abilities to facilitate, guide and assess capability development in students;

• Compiling of staff resources for the teaching and assessing of graduate capabilities.

It is perhaps useful to emphasise that this whole-of-course approach to mapping integrated and incremental capability development onto the curriculum requires that Faculty wide consultation be held to ensure that the skills are integrated into units both horizontally (across a year of the degree eg. first year) and vertically (incrementally developed from first year to final year). In operationalising this process, it is not necessary for any one unit to take on the responsibility for the whole development of a particular skill: it may be necessary (and is usually more desirable) to spread students' experiences across a number of units in a number of years (particularly, for example, in the case of multi-faceted skills such as written or oral communication, both of which have discipline specific applications in legal education). Nor is it necessary that capability development be confined exclusively to compulsory units: further enhancement of skilled behaviour may occur in elective (cf core) units later in the course. To take a legal education example, generic oral communication skills may be developed to an advanced level in a legal context as (oral) conciliation skills in an elective unit such as Industrial Law - an obvious alignment of skill development with apposite discipline content.

Further, while the undergraduate course undoubtedly has a significant role to play in student acquisition of skilled behaviour, it should be stressed that the classroom is not the only place where students are able to develop desirable capabilities. Some skills are acquired in the activities of everyday life. Students should anticipate that, and take responsibility for, skills development outside of the classroom context. The course itself should be viewed as providing the environment for students to develop the nominated skills. But it is not the role of academics in the course to be solely responsible for students' skills attainment: a significant part of that responsibility lies with the student. The potential for students taking responsibility for their own learning in this regard may be exampled by Attitudinal Skills such as pro-active behaviour and reflective practice and by Relational Skills such as time management and working independently. In these cases, students should be directed to resources made available for self-development and improvement, but it may not be necessary to devote large amounts of course time to their explicit acquisition.

A particular aspect of curriculum design that flows from this last matter is that the Law Faculty has purposely developed the concept of both implicit and explicit development of skills. This notion is directed specifically at delineating between those skills for which a unit will take responsibility for explicit instruction and those skills which the unit recognises are desirable both generally (for law studies) and specifically (for the particular unit) but which will not be explicitly developed. The implicit skills are identified as matters which students should be consciously developing and refining or regarding which they should otherwise be seeking their own further instruction (eg, basic computer skills, time management, note taking skills etc).

4. Assessment Practices.

Given the acknowledged role that assessment plays in shaping students' approaches to learning, a major consideration in the implementation of this model of course design has been the review of assessment practice. If we purport to teach to a broad range of capabilities that envisages student acquisition of generic and discipline specific skills, then our assessment practice must keep pace: authentic assessment tasks must be designed to test for mastery of both content knowledge and skilled behaviour. To promote acquisition of this new learning, attention also needs to be focussed on improving the quality of formative and summative feedback students routinely receive. In short, the driver is to "harness the full power of assessment and feedback in support of learning," (Nightingale, Te Wiata, Toohey, Ryan, Hughes and Magin 1996:6) because "[a]ssessment is not an end in itself but a vehicle for educational improvement" (American Association for Higher Education (AAHE)).

For us as legal educators, this has been one of the greatest challenges in implementing such large-scale curriculum review. Like many tertiary educators, academic assessment in law has traditionally been based on a quite narrow set of tasks, which have emphasised knowing rather than doing. To the extent that skills assessment has been addressed in law in the past, it has been primarily done indirectly through conventional assessment method: for example problem solving and critical thinking skills are demonstrated through exams and/or assignments; research skills are demonstrated implicitly through assignments (Law Discipline Network 1998). The result has been that only a limited range of skills has been developed and that students' ability to transfer skills from one context to another has not been very well developed (Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development 2002a).

We have therefore been required to re-evaluate the validity and reliability of our current assessment and feedback methods and to think critically about their transferability to the new imperatives of assessing authentic learning tasks. This work has largely been progressed under the second Teaching and Learning Development Grant referred in 2.0 above. The task we have set ourselves is to develop an assessment framework that will provide the theoretical basis for models of best assessment practice for certain of the graduate capabilities. The hypothesis is that it should be possible to assure the quality of assessment methods for capability development by evaluating the efficacy of those tasks as against the framework developed. The framework will be discussed further below.

Many resources for Law Faculty staff have already been posted on the Faculty's staff intranet, in particular amongst which are Assessment Examples (from both within and outside the Faculty) modelling how skills assessment may be optimally undertaken. A particular imperative here is for staff to be sufficiently informed by good practice to be equipped to design assessment tasks that are as clear and transparent as possible to students.

Of course, the role of any assessment will depend on the learning objectives being pursued. At a fundamental level of unit design, the type of information that can facilitate the efficacy of assessment tasks and which should be communicated to students is suggested by the following headings, all of which are directed at the necessity to be explicit about the skills objectives in the unit assessment information. Sample extracts from the Study Guide of one of the new first year units, Legal Institutions and Method, are provided under each head to illustrate unit practice:

• State the skills explicitly and implicitly developed in the unit:

• oral communication;

• critical thinking and legal analysis;

• problem solving; and

• written communication including the use of plain English.

• time management;

• independent worker;

• ethical behaviour;

• computer skills and information technology.

• Why these skills have been chosen for this unit: both in the general sense, for example that the skills in the 1^st semester, 1^st year unit are intended to provide a platform for the development of higher level skills in 2^nd semester and the balance of the degree; and specifically for each of the explicit and implicit skills:

• "Good communication skills are essential not only for success in your studies but also for success as a lawyer. In a recent survey of graduates and employers by the Centre for Legal Education (S Vignaendra, Australian Law Graduates Career Destinations, Centre for Legal Education, 1998) graduates and employers were asked to indicate the skills most frequently used by law graduates. Both employers and graduates rated oral communication as the skill most used in the work place."

• "The study and practice of law will require you ton possess highly developed problem solving skills. We will be introducing you to two of the legal methodologies for problem solving. Problem solving will also be part of the skill development in the other first year units of Fundamentals of Torts and Contracts A."

• "Time management: You should be developing and refining your time management skills very early in your studies. We have placed information about time management skills on the on-line site under Skills Material."

• "Ethical Behaviour: In its 1993 Report Complaints against Lawyers, the New South Wales Law Reform Commission (NSWLRC) affirmed its strong belief (and recommended accordingly) that the study of legal ethics and professional responsibility should be an integral part of any law school program, whether this involves mounting a discrete, compulsory subject of dealing with these questions as a significant part of a larger subject. It is only during this formative period in a lawyer's education that there is an opportunity for sustained study, discussion and reflection. As part of a general requirement for ethical [and honest] behaviour in the profession you will be required to exhibit ethical behaviour in all your dealings at law school. This includes your interactions with other students and with staff of the law school. To aid you, the Faculty has developed 'Student Conduct Guidelines' which set out certain expectations relation to your conduct between students and lecturers, between students and administrative staff, student conduct generally, and e-mail and voice mail etiquette. You will notice that compliance with the 'Student Conduct Guidelines' is one of the criteria specified in relation to tutorial conduct. Ethical behaviour will also be addressed in Law Society and Justice in semester 1 and in Criminal Law and Procedure in semester 2 of 2^nd year."

• What is the learning objective in relation to the particular skills: eg, what is the level of achievement expected for each skill on completion of the unit (in a first year unit by having regard to Level 1 criteria taken from the Table of Core Skills):

• How will each of the skills be developed in the unit (in terms of a process of instruction, practice, formative feedback, reflection and summative assessment)? This should reflect how the unit objectives, the teaching and learning approaches and the assessment are all related:

Equally as important as painting the big picture for students is the issue of explaining each piece of assessment to students in terms of, for example:

• The skills objectives of this assessment task;

• How those skills objectives link with the unit objectives;

• How do the skills developed in this unit form linkages with skills developed in other units (both horizontally and vertically);

• What reference materials/resources are necessary to complete this assessment task;

• Specific assessment criteria for this skills assessment task;

• The process for this skill's development in this assessment task: explicit and precise details of the task to be undertaken together with details of the formative and summative assessment to be undertaken.

By way of example as to how a specific assessment task in a unit might then look, the following is provided. These instructions to students deal only with the procedural aspects of the task (the written assignment) and are intended to be later supplemented by the specific substantive content. Each assessment task is dealt with in similar detail in the Study Guide for the unit and is available at the commencement of the semester.

Example: Assignment

The criteria/feedback sheet which was developed to go with this piece of assessment is sampled as follows:

• Assignment Acknowledgement Form completed and attached YES NO
• Cover Sheet attached (with word count) YES NO

In developing the resources and examples mentioned, the Project Team has derived much assistance from the case studies that form part of the ATN Project's Final Report (Bowden et al 2000; Nightingale et al 1996) and also from the discipline specific studies (and examples given therein) (see UK Centre for Legal Education 1998; UK Centre for Legal Education 1997). Ultimately however, no matter how many examples are provided, every academic eventually will have to sit down, put fingers to keyboard and see what falls out. The desire to be a little more scientific about this process is what has driven the development of an assessment framework, which is the work on which the Project Team is currently engaged. The preliminary outcomes of this work are now discussed.

1. The Current Project - A Draft Assessment Framework

4. Implications and Issues

The final part of this paper will look, necessarily briefly, at some of the implications and issues that arise for tertiary education and educators when an explicit approach to capability development is embraced. The purpose of this section is not to suggest absolute solutions to these matters but to raise awareness as to their existence for those who may tread this path. Of course, I can only speak of these matters from the perspective of my own discipline, though I imagine the experience will be fairly "generic" whatever the context.

The development of these authentic new teaching, learning and assessment environments may require a significant paradigm shift in the approach to the teaching and learning within the Faculty. While a radical overhaul of units comprising the course may not be necessary (though this did occur in our first year law program which was completely revised for Year 2000 implementation), the significantly content-based approach traditionally used in many units is no longer feasible. This is not to say that large amounts of content need to be abandoned. Rather, a different focus needs to be developed to ensure that authentic learning environments can be created for the teaching, learning and assessment of skills in parallel with substantive discipline content. In all of this there are underlying issues of academic freedom.

The substantive issues of staff development and staff commitment need to be addressed in a realistic fashion by management at both the institutional and local, faculty, levels. Staff must see leadership and commitment to capability development across university curricula demonstrated by appropriate resource and workload allocations and the implementation of staff development training. Staff development will also be assisted by the compilation of readily available resources for staff on the teaching of graduate capabilities. Significant goodwill is required on the part of all involved and a "whole of university" commitment to the validity and desirability of graduate capability development is essential. To ensure that staff ownership of units is not lost, staff should be active participants in the process from an early stage, particularly in the linking of learning objectives with new teaching and learning approaches and the development of valid and reliable assessment tasks.

It would be naïve to assume that student reaction to an explicit skills approach will be completely or even necessarily favourable. Student response to a change in focus from content to skills development embedded in content may be mixed. At present, law students (who cannot be that different from their counterparts in other disciplines) evidence a strong utilitarian ethos. As for academic staff, capability development will also require a dramatic culture shift on the part of the student body, in this context from passive to active learners. While most students may see the ultimate benefit in the development of graduate capabilities at university, many may consider they already possess sufficiently developed skills competencies. Others may perceive capability attainment and/or improvement to be too confronting and as having the potential to pull down their marks in the current, very competitive, student environment.

This paper has sought to demonstrate that the pursuit of integrated and incremental graduate capability development requires that all aspects of program design and delivery be harnessed to the achievement of this objective: from initial conceptualisation, to the operational level of mapping capability development onto discipline context, right through to ensuring the correlation between course objectives and assessment practices. This is a significant challenge for university hierarchies, faculty management, students and academic staff. In the end result, the objective is simply to offer our graduates the opportunity to be the best they can be in terms of their holistic acquisition of knowledge, skills and understanding. It is arguable that this is no more than that which has always been our responsibility to our students.

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