In the United States, judges use “pattern instructions” to inform jurors of laws relevant to the case at hand, and for the procedures they are to use in order to carry out their duties. Although these instructions are written in a legally accurate manner, social science research has demonstrated that they are often not well understood by jurors, who consequently render decisions based on an incomplete, or inaccurate, understanding of the law. This chapter reviews factors that lead to comprehension problems associated with judicial instructions, including: the language and sentence structure typically used to write instructions, jurors’ education level and life experiences that contribute to preexisting beliefs about the law, and trial complexity. The chapter also reviews the effectiveness of solutions that have been proposed for improving jurors’ understanding of judicial instructions, so that more legally accurate decisions can be rendered.

Epistemics in EMCA involves the examination of what people know, how they demonstrate their knowledge, and how they design their contributions to take into account asymmetries of knowledge. In this chapter, we investigate epistemic practices in a classroom in the children’s first year of schooling to illustrate the ways in which an EMCA approach can unpack real time trajectories of knowledge management, even in very busy classrooms.