Today's Pedagogical Resources

EDUCATION RESEARCH

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Just-in-Time Teaching

Alexander W. Astin
"What matters in college?:four critical years revisited"
Jossey-Bass Publishers,1993

The three critical factors:

student-student interaction

student-faculty interaction

time on task- (done right!)
"Students Learn What Students Study"

Just-in-Time Teaching

Learning technologies should be designed to increase, and not to reduce, the amount of personal contact between students and faculty on intellectual issues.
(Study Group on the Conditions of Excellence in American Higher Education, 1984)

Just-in-Time Teaching

Warmups and Puzzles

Concepts - Vocabulary - Notation
Modeling - Connecting concepts and equations
Visualization - Graphing
Estimating - Getting a feel for magnitudes
Relating physics to "common sense"
Applying Mathematical Relations - the scope of applicability

Concepts - Vocabulary

	During aerobic exercising, people often suffer injuries to knees and other joints due to HIGH ACCELERATIONS. When do these high accelerations occur?

1. These injuries occur when a runner increases his/her speed and is running faster than 'normal.' People need to slowly build up to a quicker speed instead of diving right into it.
2. These high accelerations occur when you start and stop the excersices because the initial and final speed is zero. While exercising the speed of bending joints is pretty much constant; therefore, the acceleration is zero.
3. The high accelerations will occur when high velocity is achieved over a short period of time like in a leg kick. The injury probably occurs when the motion comes to an almost instant stop and the acceleration is a large negative value.

Visualization - Connecting Concepts and Equations

The figure shows two pictures of a setup including a business card, a converging lens, a mirror, and the camera. The setup is sketched in the upper right. The two pictures on the left differ only in how the camera lens was focused. All of the objects in the setup remained in place. Please describe the paths that light took from the business card to the camera. The areas labeled "Part A," etc., each correspond to a different path.

Just-in-Time Teaching

Learning Styles

The Felder-Silverman Model

Learners classified as:
sensing	intuitive
visual	verbal
inductive	deductive
active	reflective
sequential	global

Just-in-Time Teaching

Traditionally Science and Engineering Instruction Favors

sensing	intuitive
visual	verbal
inductive	deductive
active	reflective
sequential	global

Teaching to All Types

Borrowed from Felder

Connect theory to phenomena that relate to it (sensing, inductive, global)
Balance conceptual information (intuitive) with concrete information (sensing)
Use sketches, diagrams, etc (visual) in addition to oral and written (verbal)
Supplement symbolic examples (intuitive) with numerical examples (sensing)
Illustrate magnitudes with physical analogies and demonstrations (sensing, global)
Occasionally give experimental observations before presenting general principles (inductive)
Provide time to think about the material (reflective) and for active participation (active)
Encourage or mandate cooperation (fits all styles and makes employers happy)
Supplement the logical development of topics (sequential) with connections to other material , other courses, daily experience (global)

Just-in-Time Teaching

In JiTT Assignments We Probe For:

Borrowed from Arons

Performing Qualitative, Phenomenological Reasoning or Thinking
Ability to Paraphrase a Paragraph of Text
Understanding the Need for Operational Definitions
Translating Words into Written Symbols and Written Symbols into Words
Arithmetical Reasoning (ratios)
Drawing Inferences from Data and Evidence, Including Correlational Reasoning
Ability to Discriminate Between Inductive and Deductive Reasoning
Checking Inferences, Conclusions, or Results