The Role of Academic Support Under ABA Standard 314
What is the role of academic support educators under the new ABA Standard 314(b)?
ABA Standard 314 is part of a suite of new standards designed to increase the use of learning outcomes and formative assessment. Learning outcomes are the competencies we expect students to have at the end of a course and at the end of the program of legal education. Formative assessments are learning exercises given during the course that help students and professors understand the student's progress toward attaining those learning outcomes. As is often said, summative assessments (e.g., an exam at the end of the semester) are designed to evaluate learning; formative assessments are designed to improve learning. The use of learning outcomes and formative assessments have long been used in other areas of higher education to encourage optimal pedagogy, but they are relatively new to the world of legal education.
ABA Standard 314(b) requires that: (1) formative assessments be used in every class in the first third of credit hours (or all classes in the 1L curriculum, where students are enrolled in a traditional 3-year program), (2) the formative assessment "include feedback that allows students to evaluate their performance relative to the learning outcomes in the course,” and (3) "[t]he law school shall make available academic support for students who fail to attain a satisfactory level of achievement on the formative assessment.” Interpretation 314-1 further explains that formative assessment methods "provide meaningful feedback to improve student learning."
What does the third part of this requirement mean?
For various reasons grounded in my own experience and background, I interpreted it as meaning that students should be referred to a law school’s academic support program if they struggled on a formative assessment. So, for example, if a professor gave a quiz and a student performed poorly on it, then the professor would direct the student to speak with the law school’s director of academic support. Indeed, this was a common practice when I was teaching.
But academic support and assessment luminary Paula Manning (and who is also a member of the ABA Outcomes and Assessment Committee
) pushed back against my interpretation, writing:
Academic support in the context of Standard 314 is not a person or department where a student is referred — it is a pedagogical tool, and an essential part of teaching for all faculty. Standard 314, which requires law schools to provide formative assessment and meaningful feedback, calls on faculty to become active participants in the support process. Formative assessment provides students with timely feedback during the learning process, allowing them to adjust and improve while there is still time to do so; formative assessment is not a triage response — so referral is not an adequate response to poor performance. Instead, effective formative assessment and meaningful feedback requires direct engagement from the faculty member who delivered the instruction, designed the formative assessment and evaluated student performance. This means under Standard 314 every law teacher should provide academic support in the context of their own formative assessments.
Under Standard 314, the reactive model — focused on identifying and referring struggling students — should give way to a proactive, data-informed teaching culture where academic support educators are not simply used as safety nets. This broader, shared model views academic support not as rescue, but as design: the creation of learning environments where all students have structured opportunities to improve and learning challenges are understood as instructional signals — not student deficiencies to be delegated elsewhere. Academic support educators are no longer “fixers” brought in after the fact. Instead, they serve as partners and consultants, helping faculty design effective assessments, interpret student performance data, and adapt instruction accordingly. Their expertise in pedagogy, metacognition, and student learning is critical to the successful implementation of Standard 314.
Referral may still be appropriate in certain cases, but it cannot be the first or only response. The initial intervention for formative assessments must come from the faculty member who taught and assessed the material.
So many words of wisdom here, and Paula is absolutely right. Individuals who are struggling are not somehow a separate student body for whom academic support educators alone are responsible — although this is the model at many schools, unfortunately. Rather, academic support educators are a resource for upping our game pedagogically and partners in a "whole school" approach to maximizing the student learning experience.
