By Megan Sumeracki
Cover image by Tung Lam from Pixabay
This fall, I’ll be teaching a course in Social Cognition. This course will be pretty different from what I’ve been teaching lately; the content area is not one that I am used to teaching, so I am excited to learn new things in preparation to teach the course. I am also co-teaching with a colleague I deeply admire, and I’m looking forward to learning from her extensive content knowledge and classroom practices.
My colleague and I both often teach hybrid classes using a flipped classroom model. Thus, it made sense for us to teach this course in a similar fashion. In general, a flipped classroom is one where the students are introduced to the content at home, and then engage in their development of understanding (or “homework”) in the classroom. The idea is to shift the content delivery outside of the classroom and shift the more hands-on activities and engagement into the classroom. This method lends itself well to discussions, group work, problem solving projects, and so on.
There are actually many, many ways to design a flipped classroom, and it has been fascinating to learn about the ways my colleague typically structures her hybrid, flipped-classroom courses. As a result, we’ve been able to engage in really interesting conversations about the best approach for this particular course, and why. As a result of some of these discussions, I came across a few recent meta-analyses related to the effects of flipped classrooms, the results of which I thought were worth sharing here (1, 2, 3).
The first, by Carrie Bredow, Patricia Roehling, Alexandra Knorp, and Andrea Sweet all at Hope College (1), was a large meta-analysis that included data from 317 studies. Over 51,000 students in postsecondary education (~26,000 in the flipped classroom conditions and ~25,000 in the lecture-based control condition) were included across their analyses. They only included studies in which there were experimental conditions for both a flipped classroom and a traditional (control) classroom taught by the same instructor. Overall, Bredow and colleagues found that flipped classrooms led to greater student performance on learning outcomes than the traditional classrooms. They also found positive effects of flipped classrooms on student intrapersonal and interpersonal skills, metacognitive skills, confidence, engagement, and overall student satisfaction compared to traditional lecture-based classrooms. While some of these effects were small, they were still positive!
A second meta-analysis, published by Zeynep Turan in 2023 (2), examining flipped classroom models in science education courses (i.e., biology, chemistry, physics, and general science). In the analysis, Turan found a positive effect of flipped classrooms on student achievement in science education classes. A notable downside from the analysis was reported increases in student and teacher workload.
