Touro Law Professors Receive $125K Grant for Research from AccessLex

Professor of Law and Director of the Legal Writing Center at Touro Law Ann Nowak and Professor of Law and Director of Academic Development and Bar Programs Suzanne Darrow-Kleinhaus received a $125K grant from AccessLex Institute® for their research project titled, “Identification and Remediation of Reading Disfluency as a Key to Bar Passage for At-Risk Populations.”

 

“The Touro community congratulates Professors Darrow-Kleinhaus and Nowak for receiving this grant,” stated Dean Elena B. Langan. “It is a testament to the importance of their research and the potential impact it could have for so many law students. We are grateful to AccessLex Institute and look forward to the study and results.”

 

Professors Darrow-Kleinhaus and Nowak will examine whether remediation of reading disfluency at the law school level will positively correlate with improved reading comprehension. The study is built on Professor Nowak’s 2017 study in which 45 percent of a randomly selected group of first-year law students exhibited problems with both reading fluency and reading comprehension. 

 

Professor Nowak summarized, “Remediation of reading disfluency has been tied to improved reading comprehension ability in younger students, and it is our hope that the same will prove true at the law school level. To our knowledge, no one has examined reading disfluency as an issue at law schools. Our hypothesis is that helping law students to improve their reading fluency will improve their reading comprehension ability, which will, in turn, help students to achieve greater success in law school and beyond.” 

 

Professor Darrow-Kleinhaus added, “Numerous studies indicate a strong correlation between law school GPA and bar passage.  However, we are not aware of any studies that have considered the link between reading comprehension and bar performance. We want to conduct this study because law schools have done a lot to aid students in passing the bar, but no one has studied how reading disfluency remediation might impact law school performance and thus bar passage.”

 

Ann Nowak is the Director of the Writing Center at Touro Law Center where she remediates deficiencies in basic writing skills among the law student population. Professor Nowak also was the Principal Investigator for Phase I of this study: “Oral Reading Disfluency as an Indicator of Hidden Reading Comprehension Difficulties Among Students in Higher Education,” for which she was awarded a Touro College Presidential Research Development Grant in 2017. The results of that study serve as the foundation for the current project.

 

Suzanne Darrow‐Kleinhaus is the Director of Academic Development and Bar Programs at Touro Law Center. Professor Darrow‐Kleinhaus also is the author of numerous books and articles on the bar exam and academic support for law students. She is a nationally recognized authority on the bar exam.

 

AccessLex Institute® is a nonprofit organization committed to helping talented, purpose-driven students find their path from aspiring lawyer to fulfilled professional. The work done at the AccessLex Center for Legal Education Excellence® is dedicated to understanding the barriers that impede access to law school for historically underrepresented groups and improving access to law school for all, identifying actionable strategies and public policies to increase law school affordability and strengthening the value of legal education. Through their various grant programs, AccessLex Institute provides funding for research focused on their core research priorities of access, affordability and value of legal education; and, that complements our research and data collection activities.

 

“The work Professors Nowak and Darrow-Kleinhaus are doing aligns neatly with our organization’s belief that much untapped student potential resides just below the surface of blunt metrics like GPA and test scores that assume a common reading fluency and comprehension level,” said AccessLex President and Chief Executive Officer Christopher P. Chapman. “Their project will attempt to drill down in these critical areas. We are happy to provide this support and we look forward to seeing their findings.” 

 

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Patti Desrochers

Director of Communications

pattid@tourolaw.edu

(631) 761-7062