Abstract:

In a flipped learning setting, the major part of content delivery is accomplished outside of the classroom and class time is instead used for engaging students in collaborative and hands-on activities. During the past decades, this pedagogical approach has gained much popularity and a large body of research supports its benefits. Implementing flipped learning, however, is not obvious and relies on many factors related to the local learning and teaching culture, the existing assessment regulations, the curricular boundary conditions and, most important, on scalability considerations. Flipping a class with 30 students might be considered as a feasible task, but flipping a lecture with 300 students turns out to be rather challenging and may potentially require considerable investments, such as room reconfiguration and increased teaching manpower. Before any department or university considers adopting flipped learning in a given local context, it will be necessary to identify possible assets and drawbacks beforehand. For this reason, we have conducted a pilot study within a physics lecture class of 370 students at a major Swiss research university.

In a one-year undergraduate physics course, we divided the student cohort into two parallel teaching settings. During one semester, we offered a highly interactive flipped class (SCALE-UP pedagogy) to one group of 52 students and a reformed lecture to the remaining 318 students. In the second semester, all students were taught in the same lecture setting, without a flipped class alternative. According to university regulations, we were not allowed to use grading as an incentive to control the students’ learning behavior or to administer different grading schemes to the separate groups. Grades for both groups were determined by a comprehensive high-stakes exam that took place eight months after the flipped classroom intervention. In order to conduct a comparative study of the different pedagogical settings, we recorded the performance of the complete student cohort (both flipped class and lecture) at different points in time:
- Force Concept Inventory (FCI): Pre- and Post-test during the intervention
- Physics Mid-term exam: 10th week (optional) during the intervention
- Math (calculus) Exam: 3 months after the intervention (as a secondary control variable)
- Physics Final Exam: 8 months after the intervention

In addition, we recorded student feedback data from two separate semester evaluation surveys. These surveys included data related to class attendance, time spent on out-of-class preparation, level of intellectual challenge, and self-confidence in the comprehension of the course material.

By analyzing those data, we aimed to address the following questions:
- What are the students’ short-term and medium-term performance gains that we can expect from flipped learning?
- Did students in the flipped learning setting adapt a different learning behavior and did their attitudes towards the learning goals differ from those of the lecture students?

In this presentation, we will present our results and draw conclusions on implementing flipped learning in large courses at a research university.

Keywords:

Flipped classroom, physics, scale-up, lecture.