• To assess how well students can describe central points in a lesson,
• To illuminate the connections students make between topics or
• To help students learn to focus attention and improve recall, mainly when you introduce a large amount of new information.

• There are no special requirements for this approach

The following workflow is meant to guide how to facilitate a Focused Listing learning activity within a classroom.

Pre-Class

• Decide when the activity will occur (before, during, or after a relevant lesson). Use the results to gauge the best starting point, make midpoint corrections, or measure the class’s progress in learning one specific element of the course content.
• Select a topic or concept that the class has just studied or will study and describe it in a word or phrase.
• Write that word or phrase at the top of a sheet of paper as a heading of related terms critical to understanding that topic.
• Determine a time and item limit.
• Based on the time and item limit set, test it by making a list of words and phrases you can recall related to and subsumed by your heading.
• Review your list, looking for any items you may have left out.

In-Class

• Present the topic to students and ask them to create their own list.
• Give students a time limit for their responses.
• Ask students to share their lists with the class.
• Review and synthesize results. Use results to guide another activity in response.

Post-Class

• Review the outcomes of the activity.

• None

• None

Example 1

In Investments: Finance / Management, the professor used Focused Listing after an introductory lecture on stocks. He asked his fifty students to list and quickly define five to seven fundamental concepts related to stocks. He allowed the class ten minutes since they wrote brief definitions and listed ideas they recalled. Reading quickly through the student responses after class, he found that more than half of the students had listed and adequately defined at least three of the six concepts; some had included other essential and valid concepts that were not on his list. At the following class meeting, the professor gave a printed list of some of the best definitions and reviewed the three fundamental concepts from his list that most students had not included. The experience led him to begin each session by writing on the whiteboard several key concepts and terms that students should focus on throughout the lecture (Angelo 127).

Example 2

Over the years, the professor in Introductory Physics for Non-science Majors found that many first-year students had problems with the specialized vocabulary used in the course. To respond to this challenge, she developed a Focused Listing activity to assess her students' knowledge of critical terminology and to raise their awareness of the information and concepts represented by those terms. On the first day of class, she handed out a half-sheet of paper and asked students to create a list of five words or phrases that define work in physics. She collected the responses. After class, she reviewed the responses and sorted them into three piles: 1) those that do at least a reasonably good job defining work in physics, 2) confuse work in physics with work in everyday life, and 3) all other responses. She pulls out some examples to quote in her following lecture. She explains and differentiates the work's distinct but easily confusable meanings: the everyday and the scientific. Throughout the semester, she uses Focused Listing to assess and help students learn key concepts, such as mass, velocity, energy, impulse, and momentum (Angelo 127).

Angelo, Thomas A., and K. Patricia Cross. Classroom Assessment Techniques: a Handbook for College Teachers. Jossey-Bass, 1993. pp. 126-131.