Transforming common-sense beliefs into Newtonian thinking through Just-In-Time Teaching

To determine whether teaching an introductory physics course with a traditional lecture style or with Just-in-Time teaching (a student-centered, interactive-engagement style) will help students to better understand Newtonian concepts, such as Newton’s Third Law, 222 students in introductory physics courses taught by traditional lecture styles and Just-in-Time teaching at North Georgia College & State University over the span of five semesters were examined using the Force Concept Inventory as a pretest and a post-test. Overall, the gains favor the Just-in-Time teaching method with a $37.6\mathrm{\%}\pm 2.0\mathrm{\%}$ gain compared to the $17.9\mathrm{\%}\pm 2.5\mathrm{\%}$ seen in traditional lecture classes. When analyzing only those gains pertaining to the Newton’s Third Law questions, the results again favor the Just-in-Time teaching method with a gain of $50.8\mathrm{\%}\pm 4.1\mathrm{\%}$ while the traditional lecture classes only saw a gain of $6.6\mathrm{\%}\pm 5.2\mathrm{\%}$. We also employed a new method of analysis which was a BIT Coding method created to quickly identify students’ understanding of Newton’s Third Law questions. This study shows that students in courses that are taught using the Just-in-Time teaching strategy better understand Newton’s Third Law after instruction than do students in traditional lecture courses.

Figure 1

Post-test scores on the FCI for two groups, JiTT (gray bars) and Non-JiTT (black bars).

Figure 2

BIT Coding for the FCI-N3 pretests (gray) and post-tests (black). (a) JiTT and (b) Non-JiTT.

Figure 3

Student responses to FCI question no. 2 on the pretest (gray) and post-test (black). The correct response is E and the most commonly chosen distractor is A. (a) JiTT and (b) Non-JiTT.

Figure 4

Student responses to FCI question no. 11 on the pretest (gray) and post-test (black). The correct response is E and the primary distractors are B and D. (a) JiTT and (b) Non-JiTT.

Figure 5

Student responses to FCI question no. 13 on the pretest (gray) and post-test (black). The correct response is A and the primary distractor is C. (a) JiTT and (b) Non-JiTT.

Figure 6

Student responses to FCI question no. 14 on the pretest (gray) and post-test (black). The correct response is A and the distractor is C. (a) JiTT and (b) Non-JiTT.