Teaching & Learning Tip: Engage Your Students in Just One Minute

Think about ways that you can help your students set short-term academic goals – ones that are challenging, but attainable. You might review some goals with a class that will be met over the next couple of weeks, for example. And then ask your students to set their own goals dealing with a particular content area. The students could then outline what they need to do to meet those goals and identify what resources they need from you to help them meet those goals. By helping students realize what they can do to control their own learning, you can help students begin to take responsibility for their own learning.

Another activity to build on this idea is the One Minute Paper. These quick, short bits of writing can help students check what they know. Hand out paper slips to your students or ask them to pick them up as they come into the classroom. Ask students to write an answer to a question about the content, lecture, or chapter for one minute (yes, time them!). 

The question prompt for these papers is an important component of the activity. Traditionally, the two questions used are “What was the most important topic in today’s class?” and “What questions do you still have on this topic?” (Chiou et al. 2014, Campbell et al. 2019). Collect the papers for review or ask students to review each other’s answers and discuss. Research on the use of minute papers has shown increased student learning (Stead 2005, Chiou et al. 2014) and reduced anxiety (Chiou et al. 2014). Students also indicated that minute papers were beneficial to their learning (Stead 2004, Chiou et al. 2014).

References

Campbell, M., E. M. Abel, and R. Lucio (2019). The one-minute paper as a catalyst for change in online pedagogy. Journal of Teaching in Social Work 39:519-533.

Chiou, C., Y. Wang, L. Lee (2014). Reducing statistical anxiety and enhancing statistics learning achievement: effectiveness of a one-minute strategy. Psychology Reports: 115:297-310.

Morrison-Shetlar, A., Marwitz, Mary R (2001). Teaching creatively: Ideas in action. Outernet Publishing.

Stead, D. R. 2005. A review of the one-minute paper. Active Learning in Higher Education 6:118-131.