Just-in-Time or Plenty-of-Time Teaching? Different Electronic Feedback Devices and Their Effect on Student Engagement

This study examines how incorporating different electronic feedback devices (i.e., clickers versus web-based polling) may affect specific types of student engagement (i.e., behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement), whether students’ self-efficacy for learning and performance may differ between courses that have integrated clickers and those that use web-based polling, and whether using web-based polling influences faculty members’ instructional practices. The participants included six instructors and 209 students enrolled in classes at a university in the southwestern United States in which the instructors used either clickers or web-based polling. The Plenty-of-Time Teaching (PoTT) and the Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) approaches and their implications are presented. The results of this study highlight the benefits of using various types of electronic feedback devices to provide innovative ways to implement JiTT or PoTT, such as gauging students’ understanding with pre-class polls, and offer insights that can benefit educators who wish to promote students’ emotional and cognitive engagement with various types of feedback devices.