The Power of Stories and Images in Law School Teaching

Abstract

Through the use of empirical studies informed by theories of memory and brain functioning cognitive scientists have made impressive gains in understanding how stories and images help student learning. Law professors have laid an important foundation for bringing the usefulness of stories and images to light but have not empirically determined whether and in what circumstances stories and images improve law student learning. This Article fills the gap by discussing three studies conducted by the author. The results are quite dramatic. For first-year students supplementation of classroom material with images is 30% better at improving law student understanding than supplementation with text-based material. For upper-level students the improvement is even larger — images are 50% better than text. Stories are 9% better than exposition at improving first-year student learning with one type of story outperforming the improvement seen by any other medium by 53%. For upper-level students the results are flipped on their head (empirically demonstrating that upper-level students learn differently than first-year students). Exposition improves performance 8% more than stories with flowcharts outperforming the next best medium by 12%. These results, and others discussed in the Article, provide a firm empirical basis for adding stories and images into the law school teaching mix.