A learning outcome should focus on what the students will learn and/or be able to do by the end of the course. Outcomes often follow the format: “At the end of the course, students will be able to insert verb here + insert knowledge, skills, or values the student is expected to develop here.”
In considering learning outcomes for your course, you may find it helpful to see the sample outcomes listed below (drawn from courses offered at another top law school). Also, the UT Faculty Innovation Center has online materials on creating learning outcomes.
Please feel free to contact Bobby Chesney or Eden Harrington if you would like to discuss.
Sample general outcomes
At the end of the course, students will have acquired understanding of and/or facility in:
- A specific body of law, including major policy concerns.
- Doctrinal analysis, including close reading of cases and precedents, and application to facts.
- Use of other disciplines in the analysis of legal problems and institutions.
- Transactional design and value creation.
- Judicial, legislative and/or administrative processes.
- Lawyering skills, e.g., oral advocacy, legal writing and drafting, legal research, negotiation, mediation, working collaboratively, client communication, and case theory and planning.
- Statutory and regulatory analysis, including close reading of statutes and regulations, and application to facts.
- Ethical and professional issues.
- The historical development of law and legal institutions.
Sample specific outcomes
At the end of the course, students will have:
- Developed an understanding of major contract doctrines.
- Developed the ability to conduct a critical analysis of court opinions.
- Learned the doctrines that govern formation, performance, and enforcement of contracts.
- Begun to develop their own normative ideas about particular cases, doctrines, and policy rationales in contract law.
- Acquired an understanding of basic American contract law, including major policy concerns.
- Knowledge of the general structure of criminal liability, including the basic principles of criminal law as contained in the common law and in modern criminal codes based on the Model Penal Code.
- The ability to read a criminal statute and understand (a) what it says and (b) what policy choices it represents.
- An understanding of and/or facility in environmental advocacy tactics and skills.
- An understanding of critiques of the international human rights field, and skills to design reforms to human rights work.
- An understanding of ethical frameworks and approaches to navigating ethical dilemmas in the immigration field.
- Facility in working collaboratively, providing constructive feedback to peers, self-assessment, and skills in contributing to clinic or other institutional growth.
- Learned to communicate effectively with clients and others, both orally and in writing.
- Learned effective approaches to solving problem: gathering facts, developing options, making decisions.
- Learned to collaborate with clinic partners and others.
- Learned to provide high quality representation to clients by mastering the necessary substantive law, lawyering skills, and ethical principles.
- Identified personal goals related to development as a lawyer and taken advantage of opportunities to make progress toward them.
- A basic understanding of core principles of corporate finance, including financial statement analysis, corporate valuation, and the theory of capital structure decisions.
- A basic facility in using spreadsheets and simple mathematical formulas to analyze financial data and investment decisions.
- Acquired understanding of the unique relationship between lawyers and entrepreneurial clients.
- An understanding of the theory and practice of negotiation.
- Enhanced their negotiation skills.
- The ability to critique their own work and to learn from experience.
- Gained facility in oral advocacy.
- Acquired understanding of and/or facility in various lawyering skills, including witness examinations, introduction of evidence, and case theory and planning.
- Increased their ability to perform in a courtroom situation.