Emerging Technology-Driven Legal Education Reform and the Cultivation of Students’ Critical Thinking Skills

The rapid development of legal education makes the past legal education methods unable to meet the needs of the times. The study integrates information technology and legal education, reforms traditional legal education, and constructs a new legal education model. VR technology is used to construct simulation scenes in mock courts, to conduct scenario teaching in legal education, and to pay attention to the development of students’ critical thinking abilities. The legal education evaluation index system is built and weights are assigned to it by using the hierarchical analysis method to evaluate the legal education model constructed in this paper. By comparing and analyzing the changes and differences between the experimental group and the control group in critical thinking ability before and after the experiment, the role of legal education reform on students’ critical thinking ability is tested. This paper’s legal education model score of 92.03 points, the overall evaluation grade is “excellent”. Before the experiment, there is no significant difference between the two groups (P>0.05), after the experiment, the P value of all dimensions and total scores of the two groups are <0.01, the difference is significant that the experimental group scores are far more than the control group. The 7 dimensions and total scores of critical thinking skills of the experimental group after the experiment improved by 9.21, 13.01, 13.17, 11.95, 11.85, 8.57, 7.69, and 75.45 points, respectively, which produced a highly significant difference (P<0.01). The critical thinking skills of the control group before and after the experiment were not significantly different (P>0.05).