During the 2017-2018 school year, a research was conducted in order to measure the level of student achievement on summative assessments when taught with flipped classroom instruction versus direct instruction. Flipped classroom instruction is where students participate in passive learning (directions, procedures, vocabulary and examples) outside of class through media such as videos, podcasts, interactive websites or even texts. Then, students return to class with their basic knowledge in order to engage in activities and other student interactions to get a deeper understanding of the content through creating, exploring and discovering. Direct instruction is the process that most people think of when the talk about school. Students come in and listen to a teacher present the material and complete homework on it outside of class.
A practical action research design was used as I was working to improve my personal instruction. Students were given a pretest for our Geometry unit on surface area and volume. After, students in my sections were taught with flipped classroom instruction while the other 7th grade math teacher taught with direct instruction. We both used the same vocabulary, processes for solving and types of practice problems. At the end of the chapter, we gave all of the students the same assessment as what they took for the pretest. The results were compared to see which set of students showed more growth from the pretest to post-test. To do this, an ANCOVA test was run. The test produced a p-value of 0.011, which is less than the alpha level of 0.05. Therefore, it was found that students who received flipped instruction scored significantly higher on their Geometry test than students who received traditional instruction.
Flip Your Classroom
By Catie Lemley