Effects of a Law-related Education Program.

The Elementary School Journal Volume 82, Number 1 ? 1981 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved 0013-5984/82/8201-0005$01.00 Law-related education (LRE) has become a significant addition to the social studies curriculum in the elementary school. Support for teaching about law has come not only from educators but also from state and local bar associations which have developed instructional materials for use in the schools. (See, e.g., American Bar Association Special Committee on Youth Education for Citizenship [hereafter cited as American Bar Association] 1975; Davison 1975; Letwin 1980.) Gross (1974) describes over 170 of these law projects. From the number of projects alone, it is obvious that the legal community has had a strong hand in directing the course of legal education in the schools. Their major influence has been to focus LRE on affective change through the acquisition of cognitive skills. Rarely in formal schooling is the objective of attitude change stated as explicitly as in legal education. A review of the literature indicates that the most frequently expressed purpose of LRE is to develop positive attitudes in children and adolescents toward the law, legal systems, and legal processes (Davison 1973; Ratcliffe 1973; Santarelli 1974; Fraser and Smith 1980). Although the research into legal knowledge and attitudes of students is not extensive, there has been enough work done to suggest that law-related concepts can be taught effectively to students in the elementary grades (Schnepf 1966; Nepi 1968; Dinsmore 1971). While most studies do not control for the effects of cur-