This article is reproduced from Janice Newton et al (Eds), Voices from the Classroom: Reflections on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (Toronto: Garamond Press, 2001), available at the York Bookstore.

The lecture is the most pervasive forum for student learning on university campuses. When you consider that the majority of classrooms and lecture halls are designed with masses of chairs and tables (usually bolted to the floor) all focused on a single location the lectern this is hardly surprising. Yet despite the physical constraints imposed by the physical environment, there are pedagogical advantages to lecturing as a mode of instruction. There are also limitations. In this article, I offer suggestions for overcoming some of them. In practical terms, I describe the One-Minute Paper [Note 1] a simple technique that can be used to improve student learning and encourage active participation in lectures [Note 2].

For teachers, lecturing has the advantage of being comfortable in some measure because it is the method that most of us experienced ourselves when we were students. It is an extremely efficient way of getting across and synthesizing a large amount of material in a short space of time. It allows maximum control over pace, content, organization, and use of time, and the lecturer is assured that the students have been exposed to a common core of material.

Years of research has shown that the lecture method is no less effective than other teaching methods (see, for example Bligh, 1972). Indeed, support for lecturing abounds—it is recommended for specific purposes such as introducing a new section of material, providing a historical background or context, connecting new concepts to previous material, providing an overview, demonstrating a skill or technique, and, summarizing major concepts, to name but a few.

Several limitations of the lecture method have been cited in the literature (Bligh 1972). Many of them stem from factors which affect student learning. Although there is no consensus on what constitutes good teaching, there is general agreement that effective teachers organize their material and classroom time in ways which promote student learning. What then do we know about learning that might affect how we plan and deliver a lecture?

Failure to remember is more often a problem of retrieval than a problem of storage, yet in its traditional uninterrupted form, the lecture places more emphasis on storage than on activities which facilitate the retrieval of information. Retention of lecture material can be greatly increased by giving learners practice in memory retrieval during the lecture. As well, studies show that we tend to remember best what we hear in the introduction and in the conclusion of a presentation, and that the average attention span is between fifteen and twenty minutes. Lecturers can turn this knowledge to advantage by stating the most important points at the beginning or the end of a lecture, and by dividing the lecture period into smaller units. This means, for example, that a fifty minute lecture might be designed to contain three beginnings and three endings. In the intervals between the units, the lecturer can provide students with much needed practice in memory retrieval [Note 3]. In the remainder of this article, I describe several of the ways in which the One-Minute Paper can be used to support this lecture structure.

The One-Minute Paper

The One Minute Paper is a technique that may be used by instructors to obtain feedback on what students are learning. It may be introduced in small seminars or in large lectures, in first year courses and in upper level courses. In its simplest and most widely used form, the One Minute Paper asks students to respond anonymously to the following two questions: What is the most important thing you learned in class today? What question remains uppermost in your mind?

Following are a few of the ways the One-Minute Paper can be used in lectures:

• Used at the end of the lecture, the One Minute Paper provides the instructor with valuable information for planning the next class. After giving students a few minutes to answer one or two pertinent questions on the lecture they have just heard, the papers can be collected and scanned after class and the major trends noted. In a large class the papers can be sampled, for example, by looking at every tenth paper. Instructors who use this technique find that it motivates students to take the task seriously if they provide feedback to students in the next lecture on the overall pattern of responses to the questions asked. It also shows students that instructors also take the exercise seriously and that they respect and value student feedback.
• In a course with tutorials as well as lectures, the information gleaned can be passed along to tutorial leaders, thereby giving them advance warning of issues which may be explored in the tutorial. A variation of the One Minute Paper, which is particularly useful in this context, is The Muddiest Point, where the lecturer asks the single question: What was the 'muddiest point' in my lecture today?
• Used during a lecture, the One Minute Paper is an excellent way to break the lecture period into smaller segments. Responses to the One Minute Paper do not have to be gathered and analyzed on the spot by the instructor. They can be collected verbally by having students form small groups. In their groups, students identify one or two common themes which may then be reported to the whole class. This provides active student involvement in the class, gives all students an opportunity to contribute to the discussion, and increases the range of students willing to volunteer answers to questions during the lecture. This method works particularly well in a two or three hour lecture.
• The One-Minute Paper and its variation The Muddiest Point are just two examples of classroom assessment techniques that can be used to obtain feedback on and improve student learning in lectures. For other techniques described in this volume, see the articles on classroom assessment in Section VIII and the author's article "Dead Silence—A Teacher's Nightmare" later in in Section VII of Voices from the Classroom.

Endnotes

1. The One-Minute Paper was originally developed by a physics professor at the University of California at Berkeley (Wilson 1986).
2. A version of this article first appeared in 1991 in Core 2:1, pp. 1,4. Its publication insprired two unsolicited contributions to Core by Aldridge and Merrens, both of which can be found in Section VIII of Voices from the Classroom. For more information about this and other classroom assessment techniques see Cross and Angelo (1988) and the two papers by Newton in Section VIII.
3. See Murray (1978) for a discussion of the research on student learning and its implications for the lecture method of teaching.

Works Cited

Bligh, D. A. What's the use of lectures? Toronto: Penguin, 1972.

Cross, K. P. and Angelo, T. A. Classroom assessment techniques: A handbook for faculty. Ann Arbor, Mich.: National Center for Research to Improve Postsecondary Teaching and Learning. 1988.

Murray, Harry G. Ten ways of improving the lecture method of teaching. The Ontario Psychologist 10(2): 7–19. 1978.

Wilson, R. C. Improving faculty teaching: Effective use of student evaluations and consultants. Journal of Higher Education 57: 196–211. 1986.