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Adapting the one-minute paper for active learning.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

This paper suggests a simple exercise that facilitates active learning by embedding regular opportunities for student participation within the structure of an undergraduate course. This exercise involves the use of in-class participation assignments, which are adaptations of a popular classroom assessment technique, the one-minute paper. While likewise serving as an assessment tool, the suggested exercise is also able to address an additional range of instructional challenges, such as stimulating critical thinking, facilitating engagement with course materials, encouraging participation, and motivating preparation.

Introduction

Student participation is a necessary ingredient for active learning. Therefore, one of our primary responsibilities as instructors is to provide students with opportunities to develop their intellectual independence through class participation. By taking an active role in the learning process, students are empowered to become "co-producers of learning" (Barr and Tagg 1995). The benefits of such pedagogy have been well documented in the literature (see Bonwell and Eison 1991; Meyers and Jones 1993) and expositions of active learning strategies have proliferated on the Web [1].

Included among these strategies is the one-minute paper, developed by Professor Charles Schwartz and first appearing in the scholarship of Robert C. Wilson (1986). This exercise involves students responding anonymously, with a minute of writing at the end of a lesson, to some variation of two questions: "What was the most important thing you learned during this class?" and "What important question remains unanswered?" These responses are then collected and reviewed by the instructor.

While widely used, there is surprisingly little scholarship on the one-minute paper. Its most conspicuous appearance in higher education literature emphasizes its utility as a classroom assessment technique able to provide rapid feedback on student learning (see Angelo and Cross 1993; McKeachie 2002). Subsequent considerations of this exercise suggest that it provides high payoffs at low cost (Light 2004), is often under- or over-utilized (Stead 2005), and can make learning fun (Tollefson 2001). What this literature lacks, however, is a conversation regarding the ways in which the one-minute paper could be used to address instructional challenges beyond classroom assessment, such as stimulating critical thinking, facilitating engagement with course materials, encouraging participation, and motivating preparation. The adaptation of the minute paper suggested here--and students' reported perceptions of it--are offered in hopes of generating such a conversation.

What are In-Class Participation Assignments?

"Please take out a notecard!" Students in my political science courses [2] hear this refrain nearly every class meeting. The recognition that they will soon be engaged in another in-class participation assignment--one of twenty completed over the course of the semester--is immediate. By building-in these assignments as a regular component of the course structure, norms for student behavior begin to crystallize by the third week of class. The students do not...

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