This week’s blog feature re-introduces an intermittent feature of my contributions to this blog: teaching ideas from faculty colleagues. This week, I am featuring two ideas from Associate Dean/Professor Mary Largent Purvis of Mississippi College of Law. Professor Purvis presented these ideas in a memorable and inspiring presentation at this year’s Institute for Law Teaching and Learning Conference hosted by the University of Arkansas Little Rock, William H Bowen School of Law. I was so excited by her ideas that I asked Professor Purvis for permission to share them here. The remainder of this posting is in Professor Purvis’s own words. 

Branching Hypotheticals. Branching hypotheticals are formative assessment exercises in which students start with a single fact pattern and then encounter a series of fact changes that force them to reconsider their analysis. By emphasizing the conditional nature of legal rules and the significance of factual distinctions, these exercises promote analytical flexibility, transfer of knowledge, and the expert reasoning skills emphasized by the NextGen Bar Exam.

Branching hypotheticals make learning visible by exposing how students think about changing facts and reveal whether their understanding of doctrine is flexible, interconnected, and responsive to legally significant distinctions. By comparing their responses across multiple branches and with those of peers and experts, students develop metacognitive awareness and learn to view legal reasoning as a process of conditional analysis rather than the application of fixed answers.

For example, a fact pattern might state, “Seller, a merchant in the business of selling laptops, signed a writing to Buyer stating, ‘I will sell you 500 laptops for $500 each. This offer will remain open for six months.’ No consideration was given for the promise to keep the offer open. Now. . .choose your analysis!”

Branch 1: Is the offer irrevocable at two months?

Branch 2: Is the offer irrevocable at four months?

Branch 3: Is the offer irrevocable if Seller is not a merchant?

Branch 4: Is the offer irrevocable if the promise to keep the offer open is oral?

Students use each branch to adapt the analysis as the facts change, helping students to view the law as conditional and dynamic.  Teachers can then see how students adapt (or fail to adapt) their reasoning when legally significant facts change. 

Confidence-calibrated multiple-choice questions. Confidence-calibrated multiple-choice questions are also a formative assessment exercise. Students must not only select an answer to a multiple-choice question, but also must indicate how confident they are in their answer (high, medium, or low). This exercise makes learning visible by revealing the alignment, or potential misalignment, between students’ confidence and their actual performance. When students are correct and highly confident, they have achieved mastery. When students are correct but uncertain (medium or low confidence), their uncertainty demonstrates a fragile understanding. Further, when students are incorrect and highly confident, this mismatch shows both the student and teacher where misconceptions exist, and when students are both incorrect and uncertain, their struggle can reveal knowledge and skill gaps. By exposing patterns of overconfidence, under-confidence, and misconception, this exercise provides teachers with actionable evidence about students’ developing understanding and judgment. For students, confidence-calibrated multiple-choice questions make learning visible by allowing students to compare their confidence with their accuracy, thereby disrupting illusions of competence, identifying fragile understanding, and fostering the metacognitive awareness necessary for self-regulated learning and professional judgment.