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ENCOURAGING STUDENTS TO PREPARE FOR CLASS: JUST-IN-TIME TEACHING

 

Getting students to keep up with the course reading and to come to class prepared is a perennial teaching challenge.  Of course, one way to “gently motivate” students is by giving pop quizzes on a given day’s reading assignment.  Just-in-time teaching (JTT)–which relies on the work students do at home in order to inspire the content of a particular class session–is another strategy that might be worth trying.

To implement JTT, instructors design a a brief assignment based on a day’s assigned readings, and ask students to submit their responses online a few hours or a day before the class meets (by email or through a  a course management system like Blackboard).  The assignments could range from anything from problem sets for a math or science class to open-ended response questions in a humanities or social science course.  Several of my own grad school professors required students to email reading critiques to the entire group the night before class, and I found that this definitely motivated me to prepare more thoughtfully for class (I didn’t want to seem like an idiot in front of my peers!).

Instructors can then review the student responses before class begins, and identify any topics or concepts that students might be either struggling with or have found especially engaging.  The instructor can then use this information and adjust the amount of time spent in class in order to focus on these areas.  Many instructors also like to pull quotes from student written responses in order to spark class discussions.

There are several advantages to using the JTT approach.  For example, because JTT requires students to do more than simply listen passively to a lecture, it promotes more active learning. Students also then have more time to think about their responses than with a typical in-class reading response, and so writing prompts can be more thought-provoking and open-ended.  In addition, assignments are completed at home, and so they don’t require the  additional class-time that pop quizzes do.

 

Resources:

• JTT strategies were first developed by professors in the physics department  at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis (in collaboration with instructors at several other schools).  The department currently maintains an excellent website on JTT that includes lots of ideas for JTT assignments.
• The National Science Foundation supported the creation of this digital library of sample reading JTT questions and other resources
• The Science Education Resource Center at Carlton College has an extensive list of more online resources, including discipline-specific resources for biology, chemistry, engineering, math, econ, psych, physics, psychology, and stats courses.