Flipping the Classroom vs Traditional Lecture

Some blog followers might be interested in a recent post “Flipping the Classroom vs Traditional Lecture” [Hake (2012)]. The abstract reads:

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ABSTRACT: Dan Berrett (2012a) in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education reported on “How ‘Flipping’the Classroom Can Improve the Traditional Lecture.”According to Berrett “Flipping describes the inversion of expectations in the traditional college lecture. It takes many forms, including ‘interactive engagement,’ ‘just-in-time teaching,’ and ‘peer instruction’,” all originating in physics education.

However, the chief criticism of Melissa Franklin, chair of Harvard’s physics department, is based on the intensity of students’ responses - the average score on a student evaluation of a flipped course is about half what the same professor gets when using the traditional lecture, she says “When the students are feeling really bad about required courses, it doesn't seem like a good thing.”

Quoting Berrett: “Liking the class is ultimately beside the point, Mr. Mazur says. He says his results from using Peer Instruction show that, on the Force Concept Inventory, non-majors who take his class outperform physics majors who learn in traditional lectures. ‘You want students to like class, but that's not the goal of education,’ Mr. Mazur says. ‘I could give them foot massages and they'd like it.’ ”

In this post I give a highly condensed version of Berrett’s report, into which I have inserted some hot-linked academic references.
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To access the complete 29 kB post please click on http://bit.ly/wYdWIl.

Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
Honorary Member, Curmudgeon Lodge of Deventer, The Netherlands
President, PEdants for Definitive Academic References
which Recognize the Invention of the Internet (PEDARRII)

rrhake@earthlink.net
Links to Articles: http://bit.ly/a6M5y0
Links to SDI Labs: http://bit.ly/9nGd3M
Blog: http://bit.ly/9yGsXh
Academia: http://iub.academia.edu/RichardHake
Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/rrhake

“I point to the following unwelcome truth: much as we might dislike the implications, research is showing that didactic exposition of abstract ideas and lines of reasoning (however engaging and lucid we might try to make them) to passive listeners yields pathetically thin results in learning and understanding - except in the very small percentage of students who are specially gifted in the field.”
Arnold Arons in Teaching Introductory Physics (p. vii, 1997)


REFERENCES [URL’s shortened by http://bit.ly/ and accessed on 25 Feb 2012.]
Arons, A.B. 1997. Teaching Introductory Physics. Wiley. Amazon.com information at http://amzn.to/bBPfop. Note the searchable “Look Inside” feature.

Hake, R.R. 2012. “Flipping the Classroom vs Traditional Lecture,” online at http://bit.ly/wYdWIl. Post of 24 Feb 2012 19:51:14-0800 to AERA-L and Net-Gold. The abstract and link to the complete post are being transmitted to several discussion lists.

Peer instruction in an online setting: evaluation results?

Some blog followers may be interested in a recent discussion-list post of the above title [Hake (2009)]. The abstract reads:

ABSTRACT: Bill Harris, in an EvalTalk post, wrote:

“I've used [peer instruction] in my [face-to-face] teaching of system dynamics, and I. . . [like others]. . . . have found more favorable results. . . . . I'll [probably] be teaching a graduate course in Systems Dynamics this year in an online space. The mix between asynchronous and synchronous modalities is still to be decided; I like asynchronous, but I recognize certain benefits of synchronous work, too.. . . . One of the things I'd like to do is to incorporate peer instruction in that course, as well. . . . . Do any of you have links to evaluations done in trying to adapt peer instruction to online teaching? Do you have links to other descriptions of that approach that don't necessarily qualify as evaluations?”

Harris is evidently referring to Mazur's “Peer Instruction” (PI) and not the generic “peer instruction” (pi) that (a) characterizes most “Interactive Engagement” methods, and (b) might be more amenable to online implementation than PI. Although I'm not aware of online examples of PI, two possibly helpful references to such implementation are “A systems approach to e-learning” [Davis (2009)] and “Practical Considerations in Online Learning” [Reis (2009)]. In addition, Rick Parkanay, in his EvalTalk responses to Harris stated that (a) he had used PI-type instruction in some of his online courses, and (b) gave seven links relevant such instruction.

But with one possible exception, none of Parkanay's seven links explicitly discusses rigorous pre-to-posttest gain evaluation of either PI or pi as adapted to online instruction, even though face-to-face PI has been so evaluated by the Mazur group http://tinyurl.com/sbys4 , and face-to-face pi has been so evaluated by Hake (1998a,b) and many others.

As indicated in "Can Distance and Classroom Learning Be Increased?" http://tinyurl.com/2t5sro : "Instead of measuring pre-to-post test gains so as to definitively gauge student learning in a course, distance and classroom education researchers. . . . .generally utilize low-resolution measures of students learning, such as student evaluations of teaching, student self-assessments, and teacher-made tests and course grades."

To access the complete 19 kB post please click on http://tinyurl.com/ycmf76y.

REFERENCES

Hake, R.R. 2009. “Re: Peer instruction in an online setting: evaluation results?” online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at http://tinyurl.com/ycmf76y . Post of 30 Sep 2009 17:24:08-0700 to AERA-L, EvalTalk, Net-Gold, and PhysLrnR.

The Case for Classroom Clickers - A Response to Bugeja

Some blog readers may be interested in a recent report with the above title. The abstract reads (slightly edited):

Michael Bugeja, in a Chronicle of Higher Education  article "Classroom Clickers and the Cost of Technology" states that clickers at Iowa State have been pushed by commercial interests in a way that subverts rather than enhances education, a complaint that deserves to be taken seriously by universities.  But Bugeja then goes on to imply that clickers: (a) were introduced into education by manufacturers, thus ignoring their academic pedigree, and (b) are nearly useless in education, ignoring the evidence for their effectiveness.  Perhaps the most dramatic such evidence has been provided by Eric Mazur, who increased the class average normalized learning gain g(ave) on a standardized test of conceptual understanding of Newtonian mechanics by a factor of about two when he switched from traditional passive-student lectures to clicker-assisted "Peer Instruction" (PI).  In addition, clickers: (1) have contributed to the spread of the PI approach by providing a relatively easy and attractive bridge from traditional lectures to greater interactivity, (2) allow instructors to  obtain real-time student feedback in histogram form, thus "making students' thinking visible and promoting critical listening, evaluation, and argumentation in the class,"  (3) archive student responses so as to improve questions and contribute to education research.  From a broader perspective, clickers may contribute to the spread of "interactive engagement" methods shown to be relatively effective in introductory physics instruction - i.e., methods designed to promote conceptual understanding through the active engagement of students in heads-on (always) and hands-on (usually) activities that yield immediate feedback though discussion with peers and/or instructors.

To access the complete 716 kB report please click on 

http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake/CaseForClickersJ.pdf

or else see ref. 56 at http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake