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%2.0% gain compared to the 17.9%2.5% 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%4.1% while the traditional lecture classes only saw a gain of 6.6%5.2%. 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. ©2010 the american physical society.