MFL benefits learners by increasing their appreciation and use of rigorous, effective, evidence-based learning activities, making them more likely to attain their best possible results in law school and less likely to underperform their potential.
MFL also benefits law schools by providing valuable psychometric data. For learners who complete Mind for Law, law schools have access to a detailed Score Report. The Score Report provides an Overall Score on the final assessment, which reflects how likely the learner is to use evidence-based law school study practices going forward. The Overall Score is an indication of whether the learner will engage law school with rigor and effective learning activities. Benchmarks such as cohort mean score are provided for comparison. The Score Report also provides an Engagement Score, which reflects the learner’s engagement with the MFL program. The Engagement Score is an indication of the learner’s willingness to do high-difficulty work in the MFL program, without immediate reward, working towards a long-term goal. The Score Report also provides specific psychometric scores, relating to each of the MFL Learning Outcomes. MFL Learning Outcomes include the ability to identify evidence-based study practices, to recognize the benefits of knowledge in legal problem-solving, to spot the characteristics of legal knowledge that yield problem-solving benefits, to recognize the difficulty of knowing what you know, to understand how deep processing aids encoding and retrieval practice creates and confirms knowledge, to understand how factual examples from precedent cases work as retrieval cues in law school testing that grant access to stored knowledge, and to deconstruct and self-assess their own written legal analysis.
MFL culminates in a legal essay that demonstrates the learner’s ability to apply legal knowledge in legal analysis. This essay is the result of a structured process in Module 4, where learners outline three premises liability cases, encode their outline using retrieval practice, and analyze a premises liability fact pattern. These steps encourage learners to apply the learning strategies and analytical skills they developed throughout the program. This essay will be available to law schools. When reviewing essays, the learner’s academic status (pre-law, 1L, 2L, etc.) should be considered.