7.3 Impact

Observations made during and after the course suggest possible impacts of the ICE framework. But it is important to acknowledge here that the approaches described above depart substantially from the more established modes of use for the ICE model.  Those familiar with the model will note that I have flagrantly bent it away from a key piece of advice offered by the ICE authors in their first book: questions for assessment should be answerable by all students and extendable by some.  Particularly on the quiz, by specifying the type of response I was trying to elicit, I created a situation whereby students who could go further were not required to; this approach masked any differences between students who could extend and those who could not on the Ideas-framed questions.  However, as noted, the skill set in legal research, and in particular legal reasoning,^[1] is readily divisible into the frames of the ICE model, albeit in sequence as opposed to concentric rings or frames. This almost certainly influenced my approach.

Students readily adopted ICE vocabulary as a way of talking about learning.  The model is portable and straightforward, which seemed to contribute to their willingness to use it both in and outside of the classroom. They used it without any additional instruction beyond the day one slides, and there were instances of students using it spontaneously.  For example, students framed in-class and email questions with the framework in mind: “Can you clarify x for me? I think I need a better grip on this concept before I can make connections…” or “I understand the concept of y, but I’m having trouble extending it to other contexts aside from what we discussed in class.”

More than half of the students completed the “Three Questions” bonus point exercise.  This was good uptake, given the time of term at which this was offered. Both their questions and their (typically extensive and thoughtful) model answers suggested they were making a sincere effort to use the framework, as opposed to merely going through the motions for the bonus point.

On the quiz, it appeared that students had adjusted their quiz-taking strategy to account for the fact that questions were classified by frame^[2]  Many students answered all the Ideas questions first – probably because they understood these to be the easier questions to answer, especially since the quiz was open-book and “I” frame answers would have been easily extracted from students’ notes or the course text. Most saved the two Extensions questions for last.

Many students also appeared to limit the time they spent on Ideas questions, saving time to work on the higher-point questions. This was evident from the fact that in some cases, not all Ideas questions were answered, but there were at least attempts to answer all Connections and Extensions questions.  This was, no doubt, due at least in part to an attempt to maximize earned points.  Nevertheless, in some cases, even when answering an Ideas-type question, students went to some effort to show that they could not only identify or describe a concept but that they also could connect it to another related concept, even though they knew that no extra points were awarded for this.

As an instructor, I found the ICE framework especially useful in two ways.  First, it helped me refine my articulation of learning outcomes. I was able to see that some of the course learning outcomes contemplated achievement at the Ideas-level; and that this was in fact sufficient. Not all outcomes needed to be expressed in the Extensions frame. This in turn helped me be more transparent in communicating learning expectations to students and in justifying my expectation of higher-level performance on some tasks. Second, the framework provided a thematic thread that could be woven throughout the course.  By referring to the framework at various points in time and in various contexts, I encouraged students to recall comments made on the first day of class regarding metacognitive awareness and self-directed learning.  This was also a way of modelling for students how they could use ICE themselves as part of a regular reflective “check-in” with their own learning.