Chunk Your Lectures for Increased Retention!

The classroom lecture is a frequently used method for providing students with critical course content. However, lectures often create a passive learning experience that requires some additional strategies to further engage students with the valuable information. A very important technique is to schedule recurring pauses in the lecture and incorporate exercises for learners to interact with the material.

By chunking the lecture into 15 – 20 minute segments, students can be provided with opportunities for active learning, which helps synthesize and sustain attention and focus on the subject matter. Structuring intermittent student-centered learning tasks changes the student’s role from being a passive recipient to becoming an active participant in constructing their own personal knowledge and understanding. Check out these examples of learning activities that involve students with processing the lecture materials, and that could be employed during periodic three to five-minute breaks in the lecture.

• Two-minute paper – students record the two - three major points they perceived from the previous lecture segment
• Muddiest point – students identify what information they found most confusing or difficult
• Recorded response – students write down their answers to questions posed by the instructor and then are randomly selected to share with the class
• Think-Pair-Share- neighboring students work together to communicate ideas and generate an answer to a question posed by the instructor
• Concept maps – students diagram the connections and relationships between major ideas or topics
• Summary reflection paper – students provide a review of the main points they learned from the lecture

Designing a learner-centered lecture format with dedicated interactions can enhance comprehension and retention of the lecture material. Students will benefit from the intervals that are allocated for them to review, reflect, and assimilate the presented course content.