The Minute Paper is the single most commonly used classroom assessment technique. It really does take about a minute and, while usually used at the end of class, it can be used at the end of any topic. Its major advantage is that it provides rapid feedback on whether the professor's main idea, and what the students perceived as the main idea, are the same. Additionally, by asking students to add a question, this assessment becomes an integrative task. Students must first organize their thinking to rank the major points and then decide upon a significant question. As we quickly realize, really good questions are hard to formulate.

Students need not necessarily be asked to list the most important or main point of a session. Sometimes a professor may wish to probe for the most disturbing or most surprising item. The Minute Paper is creatively variable to match the teaching/learning environment.

The Minute Paper assists students to organize a "chunk" of information and reduces the threshhold for expressing ignorance by making it easier (and more private) to ask a question. Minute Papers generally provide positive reinforcement for the professor and have the added surprise that students DON'T all have the same questions. Professors can read about four Minute Papers per minute.

----T.A. Angelo and K. P. Cross, 1993. Classroom Assessment Techniques, 2nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass., p.148-53.

Minute
Paper

In concise, well-planned sentences, please answer the two questions below:

1. What are the two [three, four, five] most significant [central, useful, meaningful, surprising, disturbing] things you have learned during this session?

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2. What question(s) remain uppermost in your mind?
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