Just-in-time teaching was developed for university level physics instructors in the late 1990s, but its use has since spread to many other academic disciplines.
Faculty members teaching in disciplines including biology, chemistry, physics, geology, mathematics, computer science, mechanical engineering, economics, history, English, French, philosophy, journalism, nursing, music, psychology, sociology, and writing have adopted just-in-time teaching.
These assignments are known variously as "Warmup exercises", "Preflight checks", "Checkpoints", and other names, depending on institutional settings.
The pre-class assignments cover the material that will be introduced in the subsequent class, and should be answered based on students' reading or other preparation.
Faculty using just-in-time teaching often use quotes from students' responses to the pre-class assignments as "talking points" during the class period.
Just-in-time teaching had its origins in the classrooms where faculty were looking for more effective ways to engage a particular audience – non-traditional students.
Initially the pedagogy evolved mostly by trial and error, although, from the start, many JiTT practitioners were paying attention to the education research literature.
In order to answer those questions it is necessary to examine the knowledge about teaching and learning that has accumulated over the past half century.
JiTT activities are designed to foster conceptual change, described in research literature as modification of existing knowledge.
"At the classroom and task level, there are a number of features that could increase students' situational interest – such as challenge, choice, novelty, fantasy, and surprise.
If students see the on-line assignments merely as an add-on to the course, to be completed perfunctorily in the shortest time possible and then discussed briefly at the beginning of class, before the "real" lecture, they will resent the extra work and will not get any additional benefit from JiTT.
This study analyzed responses from four force concept inventory (FCI) questions (the distractors as well as the correct answers) for evidence of students reaching the transition threshold from "common sense thinking to Newtonian thinking", a well-defined notion in physics education.
[10] Since the introduction of JiTT at the US Air Force Academy, the final exam questions in the introductory physics sequence have shifted significantly towards conceptual probing for deeper understanding.
Analyzing carefully kept records from the pre-JiTT early 1990s until the present, one finds that despite the increasingly more challenging questions, the scores have held steady and even improved in some semesters.
[11] When trying to assess the efficacy of any pedagogical strategy, it is important to appreciate that the choice and implementation of a particular teaching method will affect student and faculty attitudes and motivation as well as learning outcomes.