Teaching Case-Based Argumentation through a Model and Examples Empirical Evaluation of an Intelligent Learning Environment

CATO is an intelligent learning environment, designed to help beginning law students learn basic skills of making arguments with cases. Working with CATO, students outline written arguments about legal problems, supported by cites to cases selected from CATO’s database. CATO employs an abstract model of case-based legal argument to generate argumentation examples dynamically in the context of the student’s on-going work. CATO reifies argument structure through tools for analyzing, retrieving, and comparing cases. Also, the CATO environment reduces some of the distracting complexity of the student’s task. CATO was evaluated in the context of an actual legal writing course, in a study involving 30 first-year law students. We found that instruction with CATO leads to statistically significant improvement in students’ basic argumentation skills, comparable to that achieved by an experienced legal writing instructor teaching small groups of students (8 students per group). However, on a more complex and advanced legal writing assignment, meant to explore the frontier of the CATO instruction, students taught by the legal writing instructor had higher grades, suggesting a need for more “integrated” practice with the CATO model.