A review of the one-minute paper

Abstract

Lecturers who use the ‘one-minute paper’ generally praise it as a learning tool, for the teacher as well as the students. This article surveys the literature on this widely applicable technique and presents new evidence on students’ opinions of it and the extent of its use in the classroom. The benefits for both students and teachers appear sizeable for such a modest amount of time and effort, and students generally perceive the one-minute paper favourably. However, the one-minute paper can be easily employed to excess, reflected in quickly declining response rates over the course of two lecture series. Survey evidence suggests that the one-minute paper is perhaps not used especially extensively in UK and US higher education, largely due to lack of knowledge of its existence and the perception that it would be too time-consuming to analyse the responses.