Abstract:

The transformative period that European academia is going through requires new and innovative teaching methods that engage the learner and improve their learning techniques. Despite the fact that prior research shows its potential benefits and limited costs, the one-minute paper (OMP) has not widely been used in the economics lecture (Whittard, 2015). This classroom assessment tool, which is usually applied and the end of a lecture or an activity, involves students’ answering a few questions based on their learning and the class content, including an open question where the students must explain the aspects which remain unanswered. These replies allow the lecturers to find out whether the concepts in each module have been fully understood. Thus, teaching can be I improved with further clarification by the instructor by using this simple and easy-to-use tool.

This paper aims to study and compare the impact of the OMP on the undergraduate students’ performance attending three courses from different disciplines at the same university- Business English (delivered during the first year in the Degree of Business Administration and Management); Marketing II (second year of the Dual Degree in Business Management + Law); and Accounting Systems Management and Special Accounting (third year of the Degree in Financial and Economic Management). Each of these subjects is taught by a different lecturer. In order to analyse the use of the OMP, the following steps were carried out- first, the final grade obtained by the students was selected as a dependent variable -thus indicating their short-term academic performance-; secondly, a comparison between this course and last course’s data was made in order to find out whether the use of this short paper has had any significant improvement in the students attending these different courses; and finally attendance rate, success rate and performance rate were also analyzed to link the results with the use of this didactic tool. Furthermore, the effect of the OMP on each different course will be studied so that some conclusions can be drawn.

Keywords:

One-minute paper, didactic innovation, classroom assessment technique.