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Friday, April 13
Fostering Student Motivation and Engagement with Just-In-Time Teaching
Claude Cookman, Associate Professor,–Journalism
Sara Mandel, Doctoral Student, Art History
–J. Michael Lyons, Doctoral Student, Journalism
12:00 pm–1:30 pm
Georgian Room, IMU
*Lunch provided from 11:30*
How do we motivate our students to learn? How do we engage them in our courses? Get them to spend time on task? How do we insure they do the assigned readings - before class? How do we get them to do all this and actually like it?
Just in Time Teaching (JiTT), developed by Gregor Novak and colleagues in the Physics Department at IUPUI in the mid 1990s, has demonstrated success in science courses across the country. Funded extensively by the National Science Foundation, JiTT asks students to respond to problem sets or questions based on assigned readings via the Web shortly before lecture.
Professor Claude Cookman and graduate students Sara Mandel and Michael Lyons studied the transferability of the JiTT methods to the content and pedagogy of a humanities course. They implemented JiTT exercises in a history of photography course that they jointly taught during Spring 2006. Cross-listed in Art History and the School of Journalism, the course enrolled 150 students at the 400/500 level. The impact on students was impressive.
Responding to both quantitative and open-ended questions, students in the humanities course reported that JiTT had a positive effect on their motivation and on their engagement, as measured by time on task. Half said said they were much more or more motivated than in comparable courses, two-thirds said they spent much more or more time than in comparable courses. The majority of students also reported the JiTT assignments aided their better understanding of course concepts.
On open-ended questions, several students complained about the amount of work the JiTT assignments required, but sixty percent of the class said what they learned made the assignments worth the work:
-"Glad they were assigned - otherwise I probably wouldn't do the reading to my fullest capabilities."
-"They made me think. Sometimes when I did not want to. They also made me write, which in turn made me think. It was very difficult, but very good for me."
-"They definitely helped me keep up with the readings."
-"Very effective, at times demanding, but certainly made me a better student."
-"I found that they were very helpful in understanding the reading."
In this presentation, the speakers will share their strategies for implementing this innovative way of marrying student motivation with deeper learning. They will present findings from their research, including their assessment of JiTT's assets and pitfalls. And they will open a discussion about transferring this promising teaching method to courses in other fields.
Those attending the talk will have a chance to experience Just In Time Teaching techniques. They are invited to scan two oppositional readings that take part in a heated debate about the authenticity of one of the most famous war photographs ever taken, Robert Capa's 1937 picture from the Spanish Civil War, entitled "Falling Soldier." Those readings and other information are available on the SOTL session web site: http://www.journalism.indiana.edu/syllabi/ccookman/J462/pages/sotl.htm.
A draft of the paper on which this presentation is bass can be found at http://www.indiana.edu/~sotl/download/jitt.doc.
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