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Law-related Education: Goals for American Leadership
Program A Program of the scope of Project LEGAL will assist a district in accomplishing a wide variety of objectives in areas such as curriculum development, teacher training, expansion of curriculum materials, utilization of community resources, etc. However, Project LEGAL's national validation focused on two student, cognitive objectives. Project LEGAL views these two areas as being essential "Goals for American Leadership" and an important part of the process of developing responsible citizens. 1. Significant student growth in knowledge and comprehension of the U.S. LEGAL/Judicial System. 2. Significant student growth in
law-related problem-solving and critical thinking skills.
Eligibility Any district in the United States
or group of districts may select social studies teachers from some or all the grades at which
American History is taught, such as grades 5, 7, 8, or 11.
Evidence of Effectiveness Locally developed and validated
tests of knowledge and comprehension and problem solving related to legal issues used in
a pre/post, target/control design demonstrated significant gains at grades 5, 7, 8, and 11, resulting
in NYS validation (1979) and national validation (1982, 1992). Also, more than 2500 teachers
from 32 states, the Virgin Islands and Hungary (representing over 200,000 students)
have adopted Project LEGAL, and the majority continue to use LEGAL after the initial
implementation year.
Objectives The goals of Project LEGAL are
to advance students' knowledge and problem solving skills in the area of constitutional studies
through teacher training and implementation of Supreme Court cases/Bill of Rights issues. Following
a two-three day teacher training program, the first component is the introductory
unit. The unit consists of 10 lessons with teaching strategies that systematically and sequentially
lead to the development of high level problem solving skills. The Teacher Manuals provide detailed
lesson plans for this unit. The activities and examples are varied to meet the abilities of
each grade level. The second component is the bi-weekly
lessons that teachers prepare to fit into existing state-mandated history course content.
Each of these lessons reinforces the knowledge and problem solving skills presented in the
introductory units. For these lessons, the teacher determines the curriculum content and particular
issues or cases to be studied, using LEGAL's teaching strategies and visuals of landmark
Supreme Court cases. The visuals are especially helpful for teaching problem solving to learning
disabled or remedial reading students.
Project LEGAL has student and teacher materials.
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