written by Sarah P. Formica, Jessica L. Easley, and Mark C. Spraker

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.

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Released under a This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. The article citation is: S. P. Formica, J. L. Easley, and M. C. Spraker, Transforming common-sense beliefs into Newtonian thinking through Just-In-Time Teaching, Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 6 (2), 020106 (2010), This file is included in the full-text index.