Reviewing Student Responses
Timeline for Reviewing Student Responses
You will need time to read and process student responses to the Just-in-Time Teaching questions you've posed before the class period in which you will lead the discussion of their answers. How much time that takes will depend on the complexity of the questions, how many students are in the class, and how quickly you can process the information. Most instructors who use JiTT set a deadline of two or three hours prior to the beginning of class. However, some instructors ask for the responses by the evening before the lecture period, especially for an early morning class. This short time span for you responding to their work is what gives Just-in-Time Teaching its sense of immediacy. Students may be given a few days to one week to think about the questions outside of class. However, to foster the sense of immediacy many instructors give only one day for students to respond.
Processing Student Responses
As you read your students' responses to the JiTT questions, you need to do two things simultaneously: evaluate their answers and think about how you will integrate their responses into the lesson.
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Giving credit for JiTT responses
Instructors are encouraged to place some sort of point value to the JiTT exercises, perhaps a percentage of the students' final grade. Students perform better if their work counts towards the course grade in some way. However, if you use many JiTT exercises in a course, you may choose to grade only some random selection of them. Some instructors grade the accuracy of the responses, while others award points for honest effort on completion of the web-based forms. See the assessment page for more information and a sample grading rubric. Using a rubric greatly speeds the process of grading. Whatever reward method you choose, let students know up front how their JiTT responses will "count."
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Preparing for an Active Learning Session
You'll want to have already done most of the planning for your class period before you read student responses to the JiTT questions. Their answers will simply guide your choices in how much time to spend on various activities and how to involve the class in the discussion. For example, if you see a pattern of misconceptions or a lack of understanding of a key concept as you read their answers, plan to spend extra time addressing those topics. One way to do this is to post sample student responses, representing conflicting viewpoints, and use them to lead a discussion. Or ask students to expand on incomplete answers, or to volunteer their opinions. You can also design an activity to do as a follow-up to the JiTT questions - something that builds on their knowledge, since you can count on most of them having done the reading.
