okay so this is
joint work that a colleague Dr. Sarah Cosgrove and I
work on and we've worked on a few projects with
incorporating technology into our classroom this is the most recent
entitled the better blend? flipping the
classroom and so we're going to look at
evidence from principles of micro economics
so the idea behind this project was
a frustration with students coming to us
after
exams usually saying I studied really
hard I felt like I understood the material
when I got to the test I couldn't do anything and we get this a lot
and we tried first
our first set of projects dealt with just doing a traditional blend
where we substitued some online lecture
face-to-face lecture content with some online work and projects
and yet we still saw that frustration and so we decided to do something
different we decided to think about flipping the classroom
and this is a technique that's
popular in a lot of the technical fields, economics is a rather technical
among the rather technical social science so we thought maybe there's something there
maybe we can think about
developing these higher-levels of learning
through this flipping and i'm going to describe this flip in just a minute
just going back to the blended learning I should say
there even if you look at the, let me go back, even if you look at
the literature and there's a
a small literature on blended learning in economics
the results are pretty mixed some
studies find an improvement some studies find no improvement
some studies find that blended learning classrooms do worse
in terms of student learning in the best way that we can measure that
so there is some mixed evidence at least within economics
so we're saying maybe there's something to this flipping maybe it's the way we're blending the class
that is not producing the results that we want
so what did the flip look like so
Dr. Cosgrove actually implemented the flip she and I talked before this semester
started to develop the class and how
we want to go about doing it
but she actually was the one teaching the class, so she had a large section of principles of
microeconomics, 120 students enrolled in
a Tuesday, Thursday 75-minute class and
so we
divided the students randomly into two days so with the exception of a few days throughout the semester
a group of 60 always met on Tuesday and a group of 60 always met on Thursday
the first day and the last day of class they all met together and they had exams
at the same time but every other day it was either
a Thursday class or a Tuesday class so 60 people a class
there were two undergraduate TA's one for
each day
this project was funded by a curriculum redesign grant
and so we were funded with a second TA
and that really helped
so on the online content Professor Cosgrove
recorded prior to the start of the semester lectures
so for every unit for every chapter for everything she wants to do she recorded it
with TechSmith Relay and a tablet PC
and made it available on Blackboard to students before each class
and required that they view these lectures
this was a very high up-front cost
to Professor Cosgrove, this took a lot of time before the beginning of the
semester she's lecturing her entire semesters worth of lecture
into a computer to record them and so that does take a lot of time
the other major online content was
online homework through homework management site which was not very difficult
to impliment or difficult for
Professor Cosgrove to use
what was more interesting was the face-to-face content
and in the face-to-face content there
was no
lecture content during the face-to-face classes
this was deliberate because we want
to encourage the students
to use the online material and to use the online lectures
prior to coming to class so lecturing
in class would've undermined the
flip in other words if we gave students a reward
for coming to class unprepared then they would come to class unprepared
and not watch the lectures ahead of time, so instead
every class started with a quick quiz
so this is a low stake exercise low levels
of learning just to make sure
the students viewed and digested some of the online lectures prior to coming to class
what was done during class were
scaffold-ed problem solving in small groups so we divided
the students up into groups and gave them problems to work on
and as students answered the problems we rewarded that with more difficult problems
so the entire class was devoted to active learning
Professor Cosgrove and the TA would walk
around in the class
and answer questions to the groups so
instead of
Professor Cosgrove standing up and lecturing as would in a normal face-to-face class
she would go around and see who was
having trouble with what problem and
the TA did the same
now one thing we had to do
one thing Professor Cosgrove had to do was teach students how to be in a flipped
class because it's not something they're use to doing
so she actually had to explain to them this is how you're supposed to
digest the lectures before you come into class, you have to take notes on the lecture
just as you would in class and this is something that's relatively new to students and so
it was a little bit difficult to implement at first
and then if there were questions that were common to all the groups then
Professor Cosgrove would stand up and explain those problems
alright so thats the structure and
we then decided to analyze some
results of student learning so we're
a rather empirical bunch economists and we like to look at
the effect of our
policy and treatments in this case to see if they have any effect
so just going very briefly into the
experiment that we did, we did a Pre/Post experimental design meaning we have a pre test
and a post test, we actually gave a test in between
we with IRB approval gained additional controls from the student transcript
and University profile so we got IRB approval to do that
and we had control groups, two 60
student standard blended classes meaning ones where
not where there's still lecture content given in face-to-face classes
so kind of the more traditional blend than you'd think of
and then we examined the differential
gains and test scores
meaning seeing if flipped students gained more
between the pre and post then the
non-flipped students and they did
about 10 percent, 9 to 10 percent more this is after controlling for
as much as we possibly could control for so
there's a few conclusions and a few directions of future work that we're going to work on so
one thing we want to think about is the study behavior because what we're really asking the students
to do something completely different than what they're use to with the flip, so we want to analyze in some way
how their behavior changes as a result
a flipped class requires much more preparation
than a face-to-face lecture typically and
we want to see not only if the study behavior was
adopted by the students but also do these spillover into other classes
are they learning how to learn basically in this flipped format
that's going to be a little harder to measure
the next step I think is to apply to
upper-level economics classes and these upper-level economics classes
tend to be even more technical and so I think these
scaffold-ed problems if this active learning
would do well
in intermediate theory courses and I think that's
kind of where we're moving so in terms of  the implementation
their needs to be some refinement made to the
to the in class problems to make sure that
we're really building on one from the other
so this is the first time we did this, this is a dry run basically and so we want to try to
refine these problem to
make them really capture these higher-levels of learning
there might be some small refinements to the structure of the course
that will be informed by the study behavior so
maybe we want the students to maybe ask us the lectures even earlier then they already are
we don't want the students to use the
lectures
to cram for exams which is all evidence
is pointing that's what they're doing even
anecdotally I would walk around liberal arts and here
Sarah's voice through peoples computers
so there's a lot of cramming going
on and people are using this more
cramming tool than as a lecture tool so maybe there's some way to incentive it as using it as
a lecture tool rather than a cramming tool also
and this might seem insignificant but it's not the layout of the classroom really
matters when you're doing a flipped class so this class was held in Dion 106
I think
which is that large vaulted lecture hall
so
Professor Cosgrove and the TA's would have to climb up the stairs
to meet with groups and people wanted
to talk to each other and turn around it would be really difficult so classroom
layout might seem silly but it actually really matters
and that's all I have
