HOW TO IMPROVE THE STUDENTS’ AFFECTIVE DIMENSION WHEN LEARNING SCIENCE THROUGH A FLIPPED-CLASSROOM SETTING: A CASE STUDY

Teaching science has always been a tough task for many professors mainly due to the little appealing that scientific contents have for the students. This is even more accentuated in humanistic disciplines at university levels, mostly because of the lack of enough scientific knowledge. This situation has a strong negative influence in the students’ affective dimension and also has adverse implication in the learning process. In order to ease the scientific content learning, this research explores the potentialities of implementing an inverted instruction or flipped methodology in a general science course, the sophomore of the Primary Education, the Training Teaching School of the University of Extremadura. The effectiveness of the instruction methodology was gauged in terms of its capacity of improving different positive emotions during the learning process. A total of 127 students participated in this study randomly arranged in two groups. A traditional-teaching setting was followed in the control group, while a flipped classroom setting was implemented in the experimental group. The students’ emotions felt while taking the general science course were assessed by means of different validated questionnaires, and results were quantitative and qualitative analyzed. Results show that following an inverted instruction methodology positively influenced the student’s affective dimension, fostering the positive emotions experienced while learning science and diminishing the negative one. According to the comments provided, this methodology helped them to increase their confidence and reduce their concern to learn complex scientific contents. These results were even more significant in those students having a weaker scientific background.