Effectiveness of a Flipped Classroom Model in High School Mathematics
The Problem:
The problem is that many students in high school math classrooms are unengaged and unmotivated by the traditional classroom model.
The Research Question:
How effective can a flipped model classroom be in the high school mathematics context, and which groups of students does it have the greatest impact on?
The Literature:
I have reviewed several studies on the flipped classroom. All of those reviews can be found at the links below.
This study aimed to see how the flipped classroom could effect learning in high school mathematics through the lens of learning to solve systems of equations using the elimination method. Specifically, I wanted to see if the flipped classroom approach had different impacts on low, average, or high performing students. Two classes of freshmen math students of similar ability were used for this study. Each class was similar in size and met for two hours five days a week. One class was taught using a traditional style of instruction in which the teacher lectured, gave notes, then students practiced the skill in groups during class and again individually as homework. The other group of students watched a video at home before class on the topic, then spent most of class practicing solving systems of equations in groups. The students taught using the traditional method were assessed after completing the homework and being allowed to ask questions about the homework before the assessment. The students taught using the flipped method of instruction were assessed following their practice in groups the day after watching the video as homework. Each group was given fifteen minutes to complete the same assessment. The assessment was five questions in length, three of which were skill-based with no context and two of which asked the students to apply their knowledge in context.
Below is the video watched by the students in the flipped classroom.
Below is the five questions assessment given to both groups of students.
Results:
The results from my study show that historically average-performing and historically high-performing students had lower scores in all areas in the flipped classroom than in the traditional classroom. However, student who were historically low-performing had higher scores in all areas in the flipped classroom than the traditional classroom. These results are summarized in the graphics below.
Below are the scores for the high performing students.
The graphic shows that the flipped classroom resulted in lower scores among flipped classroom students than their traditional pedagogy counterparts on all types of questions. The percentage differences in scores among this group were relatively consistent ranging from 10 to 15 percent.
The historically average performing students scored slightly less overall and on contextual based problems (1 and 3 percent, respectively). However, they scored considerably less on process-based questions by 11%.
The historically low-performing group of students scored higher in all categories with positive percent differences of 10, 19, and 8 on their overall, process-based, and contextual scores, respectively.
Conclusion:
I would like to make a point that this study covers just one lesson with a limited number of participants. The results are in line with the study done by Bhagat, Chang, and Chang, which I reviewed on this my blog here, which found that low-performing students were positively impacted by the flipped classroom method of instruction. The flipped classroom approach seemed to have a negative effect on the learning of average and high performing students with high performing students being more severely impacted than average performing students, while showing gains in learning for historically low-performing students.