We have experimented this year in unit B203 (Acoustics of Speech and Hearing) with a technique called 'The One Minute Paper'. This was first used by the Harvard Assessment Programme and brought to our attention by Professor Richard Light when he visited UCL last year.

The technique requires students to use 1 minute at the end of a lecture to write down the answers to two questions:

1. The main concept today was...?
2. The unanswered question/unclear/muddled point today was...?

We have found that once students know this will happen at the end of the lecture they start to think more during the lecture about the concepts the lecturer is trying to get across and to formulate their questions ready for the task at the end of the lecture - thus interacting more with the lecture material. The summary of the answers to question one may also prove useful for lecture preparation of the same topic next time. This idea is also being tried in one of the linguistics courses, where students bring their One Minute Papers to the tutorial.

Our video-taping of lectures has continued this year with the addition of our course in English Intonation. After taping, the lectures are made available to our students as part of the audio-visual resources in our Listening Centre. The videos provide extra backup for students on the course and are a valuable resource for lecturers wishing to develop their lecturing skills. The availability of the videos does not appear to affect student attendance at the lectures.