The Primary Affordance of Flipped Instruction Might Be More Opportunities for Active In-Class Engagement

• In Event: Studying Flipped Mathematics Instruction in Secondary and Postsecondary Contexts

Abstract

Objective
Many studies that show benefits of flipped instruction have traditional in-class lectures as their control condition. Given the strength of evidence that more active engagement with content in undergraduate STEM classes leads to better student learning, we should be concerned about the continued use of lecturing as the control in educational studies (Freeman et al., 2014).
We attempted to circumvent this issue by conducting a four-year, quasi-experimental study of the effects of flipped instruction on student learning gains and attitudes in a Thermodynamics course (engineering) and an Introductory Differential Equations course (mathematics) at a small, liberal-arts STEM-focused college. The conditions of the study was carefully controlled so that content, assignments, assessments, and instructors were identical across both treatment and control groups. Learning gains were measured via pre- and post-class assessments so as to reduce the effects of students' prior knowledge about the content.

Methods and Data Sources
Students in the treatment sections of the course watched short video lectures created by their instructors before coming to class and engaged in in-class learning activities. Students in the control sections of the course experienced some short lectures during class but also engaged in many of the same in-class learning activities. In this way, both groups actively engaged with the content during class, both individually and in small groups. In the final year of the study, all instructors switched to a hybrid course for all sections for both courses.

Though we will primarily focus on results from the Introductory Differential Equations course, we list all of our data sources for completeness. Measures of learning included the Concept Inventory for Engineering Thermodynamics (Vigeant, Prince, Nottis, & Miller, 2011), Chemical and Thermal Process Assessment, and other in-house thermodynamics and differential equations learning assessments. Affective measures included items from Research on the Integrated Science Curriculum (RISC), Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (Pintrich, 1991), Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (Schraw & Dennison, 1994), and additional course-specific questions. We also collected feedback from students regarding their experiences in these courses and data on students’ video-watching, homework completion, and study habits.

Findings and Significance
We hypothesized that increased student learning might occur because of the additional time that students would have with instructive actively working on meaningful tasks in the treatment sections of these classes. However, significant differences in student outcomes between treatment and control groups were sporadic and inconsistent between years. Rather, the bulk of the data show no significant differences in either learning gains or attitudes between treatment and control groups.

In light of these and other similar results, we posit that the primary affordance of flipped instruction might be more opportunities for students to actively engage with content in class (Jensen, Kummer, & Godoy, 2015). Given our institutional context, the lack of significant differences between treatment and control groups could stem from the saturation of any effects of so-called “active learning” instructional strategies. Further research on flipped classrooms should avoid comparisons with traditional lectures and should define the learning conditions with “thick” descriptions (Geertz, 1973).

Author

• Darryl Yong, Harvey Mudd College