Doing things with factors

We conducted an experiment to investigate whether a human tutor could employ the CATO model and instructional program to teach legal research and argumentation skills to beginning law stu&nts. The CATO model covem arguments comparing and contrasting casesin terms of factors, abstractionsof facts that tend to strengthen or weaken a party’s position on a legal claim. At the time of the experimen~ the CATO program comprised tools and resources that help apply the CATO model to specific problems, most importantly, a case database and tools for retrieving, displaying, and comparing casesin terms of factors. We compmed human-led itulruction with CATO against more traditional classroom instruction designed to teach the same skills, without the use of the CATO model or tools. The subjects were 17 fmtsemester students from the University of Pittsburgh Law School. We found that human-guided instruction with CATO was as good as classroom instruction, We also found that answers generated by the CATO program were scored higher than the students’ answers, suggestingthat the model can potentially be employed even more effectively to teach students. Examples drawn from protocols of CATO sessionsih.trate that students can use the CATO model to guide and facilitate the construction of arguments and often go beyond the model’s limitations, at least under the guidance of a human tutor.