I am very happy to have found and reviewed “How to flip the classroom – “productive failure or traditional flipped classroom” pedagogical design?”” by Yanjie Song and Manu Kapur. This study is very recent (January 2017) and addresses a question that I have been asking since I started looking into flipped classrooms: if I were to adopt a flipped classroom in my current teaching situation, how could I blend an inquiry-based style of teaching and curriculum with a flipped classroom pedagogy?
The article begins with the authors stating that the flipped classroom has become popular in recent years but there is no uniform definition of what exactly it is. Additionally they explain that generally a flipped classroom makes direct instruction something that happens outside designated class time rather than during class time and that how to enhance student learning and problem solving skills has scarcely been addressed by the research. This study inquired about the affects of using a traditional flipped classroom approach, in which students watch videos that are taught lecture-style at home and then practice the content from the videos during class, as well as using a productive-failure based flipped classroom approach, in which students problem-solve in groups during class and then consolidate knowledge outside of class by watching videos. The study was conducted at a Hong Kong secondary school in two 7th grade classrooms (11 and 12-year-old students) with class sizes of 25 students each. One class was taught using the traditional flipped classroom approach while the other was taught using the productive failure-based flipped classroom approach. The authors describe the students in the study as “students with better learning motivation and higher learning abilities” (Song, 2017). The two classes were taught separately by two male teachers, each with about 10 years of experience. The article states that both teachers were enthusiastic about using innovative pedagogies and had participated in some workshops related to flipped classrooms. The study looked at a 2-week covering polynomials of which the students were expected to have no previous knowledge. Data was collected in the forms of “pre-, mid-, and post-domain tests, the post-conceptual understanding questions, focus group discussions and student survey about their video-clip watching activities regarding location, frequency, and devices used” (Song, 2017). The tests got increasingly more difficult with the pre-test having 9 low-level difficulty questions, the mid-test having 10 fair-level difficulty questions, and the post-test having 10 questions that were comparatively higher in difficulty than the first two tests. In the post-test, there were 3 conceptual understanding questions used to test students gains in conceptual knowledge. The survey regarding students’ video-watching locations, frequency, and device usage revealed that 100% of students in both groups watched the videos, and all of them watched at home. 53.8% of students in the traditional flipped classroom watched the videos 2 or 3 times while only 42.9% of the productive struggle-based flipped classroom students watched the videos more than once. Furthermore, the authors state that 27% of the traditionally flipped classroom students watched the videos on tablets or computers and 47.6% the productive struggle-based flipped classroom students used those platforms. These results are interesting, but the authors do not mention whether or not they believe they are coincidences. In both styles of teaching, students improved their knowledge of polynomials and the differences in the results on the pre-, mid-, and post-tests were insignificant. However, the students who received productive struggle-based flipped classroom instruction significantly outperformed the students in the traditional flipped classroom group. The authors conclude that “the ‘productive failure-based pedagogical design’ indeed addressed the twin demands of covering the mathematics curriculum and motivating students to learn. My Thoughts I found this article to be very useful to me since my school uses an inquiry-based curriculum which ties in nicely with this study’s use of the productive struggle based flipped classroom. It seems that the findings are in line with previous research about the gains between inquiry, problem-based classrooms and traditional classroom only now they are in the context of flipped pedagogy. It is unknown whether either of these two methods are better than a traditional style of teaching since that was not used in the study. This would be good to know, but the findings are still valuable. I think it is important that students have conceptual understanding, so this study does suggest that productive struggle-based flipped classrooms could be a viable option for someone wanting to flip their classrooms. I think that the population of students in the study is crucial when making decisions about whether or not, and how to, flip a classroom. These students were Hong Kong 7th graders, all of which had high learning abilities, access to technology, and 100% of them watched the flipped instructional videos. I don’t think this relates to what is the reality in my school and many others in the United States. Regardless, this study was needed and has served as a useful resource for myself. References Song, Y., & Kapur, M. (2017). How to flip the classroom--"productive failure or traditional flipped classroom" pedagogical design? Educational Technology & Society, 20(1), 292+. 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I have finished collecting my research and would like to share some reflections and insights I have had in doing so. I went into the data collection phase quite nervous about having everything go smoothly and according to plan. My data came from two classes taking an assessment in class, so I had a specific timeframe to execute the data collection, and it had to go efficiently. At this point, I had already obtained consent forms and done all the paperwork, I just had to be sure to not let any hiccups derail me from collecting the data this process has been about.
I found the collection to be quite smooth. Students knew ahead of time that they would have a short online assessment at the beginning or end of class based on whether their class received traditional or flipped instruction, respectively. The students were familiar with the platform I used to collect data as it is a website I use regularly in my classes (goformative.com). The combination of these things allowed for the data collection to go smoothly. My data can be downloaded from the site seamlessly into Microsoft Excel, which will allow me to effectively analyze the data. I have yet to analyze the data but will do that soon. However, to this point, the process has been smooth, and this was a crucial checkpoint to have met. I would like to credit the way that this class has been laid out for allowing me to easily accomplish my data collection. By finishing bits and pieces of this project at a time, I found the data collection piece to mostly stress free. |
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March 2017
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