Micro-writing tasks during lecture

Written by Torbjørn Ergon, 7 September 2015.

In this micro-writing exercise I made the student do four different micro-writing tasks during a double 2 × 45 minutes lecture. The lecture was about population dynamics of small rodents in a Masters/PhD-course in alpine ecology, and the tasks were as follows:

• Task 1 - “Write everything you know about lemmings!” (2 min.): In the very beginning of the lecture I told the students that they were going to do some micro-writing tasks during the lecture. I told them that this was a new teaching technique that I wanted to try out. They would not be asked to hand in what they wrote, or share it with anybody else. I explained that I would give them a key-word that they should write everything they knew about, non-stop, for 2 minutes. When everybody was ready, I said “Write everything you know about lemmings!”. I did not do any exercise prior to this as I considered this to be a rather simple task.
• Task 2 - “Write down everything you remember from last lecture!” (2+ min.): At the end of the first lecture, I told the students that they would be asked to write down everything they remember form the first lecture when they got back in after the 15 min break. I stopped them 2 minutes after the last ones had started.
• Task 3 - "Write down what you have learned about population dynamics of small rodents!” (2 min.): This task was given at the end of the lecture, and was immediately followed by Task 4.
• Task 4 - “Write down a question about something you would like to learn more about regarding population dynamics of small rodents!” (1 min.)

Task 1 was intended to get the students to think about what they already knew (or thought they knew) about the topic of the lecture, to get them to focus on the topic and hopefully spark some interest, and to introduce the idea of “micro-writing”. Task 2 and 3 had the purpose of repetition and summarizing what they had learned, and also making them aware of what they had not understood (by being forced to formulate their ideas). Task 4 was meant to get the students to think more widely about the topic and also activate them for the following questions-session.

After Task 4 I asked the students to fill in an evaluation form where they were instructed to “Score the usefulness of the micro-writing tasks from 1 to 5, 1 indicating «a complete waste of time» and 5 indicating that the task greatly aided the learning process”. I did not ask them to hand in what they wrote, or share it with anybody, as I wanted them to experience how micro-writing could be used in their own learning process, and I also wanted them to keep their notes for later reference.

EVALUATION RESULTS

Histograms of the evaluation scores for each task are given in the Figure below. Tasks 2 and 3 achieved the highest mean scores. Four students did not score the usefulness of Task 4. I think this was because they had not completed this task, as they were still working on task 3 when this task was given and they only got 1 minute on completing task 4 before I handed out the score sheets. This may also be the reason for the bi-modal score distribution for this task – 5 of 16 (31%) students gave score 2 while the same proportion gave the highest score (Task 4 had the highest proportion of score 5 among all the tasks).

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The first introductory task (“Write everything you know about lemmings!”; Task 1) received fewer high scores than the other tasks. This may have been different with a different key-word, and it may have had more unconscious positive effects. However, I think I could have engaged the students in similar ways by asking them questions in the introductory parts of the lecture, and I am not convinced this micro-writing task was a good use of time by itself; perhaps the most important aspect of Task 1 was as an exercise for the other tasks. The repetition/summarizing tasks (Task 2 and 3) received generally high scores. Task 2, which took place in the beginning of the second lecture, is easy to implement and seems to be a very good use of time (while waiting for the last students to enter the room). I also felt that the students were much more engaged in the second lecture than in the first, which may in part be due to positive effect of Task 2. I got little time to answer questions in the end of the lecture which I think was very unfortunate – I would rather have spent more time on answering questions than spending time on Task 3 and 4, but I think these are potentially useful tasks if the lecture ends early.