The flipped classroom: for active, effective and increased learning – especially for low achievers

Teaching at the university level has been performed in a relatively similar manner during a long historical time and across cultures. As a central pillar, we find the traditional lecture with the professor, or the “sage on the stage” as put by King (1993), transmitting knowledge to receiving students. Nevertheless, over the past 30 years, university education and traditional lectures in particular have been strongly criticized. The main criticism has cast light on the following: students are passive in traditional lectures due to the lack of mechanisms that ensure intellectual engagement with the material, student’s attention wanes quickly, the pace of the lectures is not adapted to all learners needs and traditional lectures are not suited for teaching higher order skills such such as application and analysis (Cashin, 1985; Bonwell, 1996; Huxham, 2005; Young, Robinson, & Alberts, 2009). Consequently, various researchers and educators have advocated forms of lecturing based on an active learning philosophy, some involving novel technology mediated interactions (Beekes, 2006; Rosie, 2000), others without an explicit focus on technology such as the enhanced lecture of Bonwell (1996). However, despite the comprehensive critique, the traditional lecture continues to prevail as the predominant didactic strategy in higher education (Roehl, Reddy, & Shannon, 2013).

It is against such a background, and to high extent because of advancements in educational technology, increasing pressures on higher education have been witnessed that have spawned a push to flexible blended student-centered learning strategies that mitigate the limitations of the transmittal model of education (Betihavas, Bridgman, Kornhaber, & Cross, 2015). Accompanied with the shift to provide student-centered learning we have seen a surge of researchers and educators advocating flipped classroom curricula in higher education. The advocacy of the flipped classroom model is justifiable. Judging by its underlying theory and the conducted empirical studies, the flipped classroom model appears to address several challenges with traditional ways of lecturing and pave way for active learning strategies and for using classroom time for engaging in higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy (Krathwohl, 2002) such as application, analysis, and synthesis.

The flipped classroom model is based on the idea that traditional teaching is inverted in the sense that what is normally done in class is flipped or switched with that which is normally done by the students out of class. Thus, instead of students listening to a lecture in class and then going home to work on a set of assigned problems, they read course literature and assimilate lecture material through video at home and engage in teacher-guided problem-solving, analysis and discussions in class. Proponents of flipped classroom list numerous advantages of inverting teaching and learning in higher education according to the flipped classroom model: it allows students to learn in their own pace, it encourages students to actively engage with lecture material, it frees up actual class time for more effective, creative and active learning activities, teachers receive expanded opportunities to interact with and to assess students’ learning, and students take control and responsibility for their learning (Gilboy, Heinerichs, & Pazzaglia, 2015; Betihavas et al., 2015).

Despite that flipped classroom is a rather new phenomenon in higher education, some empirical research has been conducted. For instance, McLaughlin et al. (2013) and McLaughlin et al. (2014) analysis of pharmacy students’ experiences of flipped classroom courses revealed that students prefer learning content prior to class and using class time for applied learning, and that students who learned through a flipped classroom approach considered themselves more engaged than students attending traditional courses. Similar findings were obtained by Davies, Dean, and Ball (2013) who compared three different instructional strategies in an information systems spreadsheet course, and showed that students attending the flipped classroom course also were more satisfied with the learning environment compared to the other treatment groups. Several studies report that students enjoy being able to learn in their own pace and that they prefer flipped classroom over traditional approaches (Butt, 2014; Davies et al., 2013; Larson & Yamamoto, 2013; McLaughlin et al., 2014; Roach, 2014; Gilboy et al., 2015). In term of examinations of learning outcomes, Love, Hodge, Grandgenett, and Swift (2014) demonstrated higher exam grades for students using a flipped classroom approach as compared to students learning through traditional methods. Hung (2015) showed similar results for English language learners. Another study by Findlay-Thompson and Mombourquette (2014) comparing traditional teaching methods and the flipped classroom approach within the same business course showed no significant differences in academic outcomes.

However, empirical research on the flipped classroom model in higher education, and more detailed investigations of students’ perceptions of its use, is in its infancy and the need for further research is underlined by many (Bishop & Verleger, 2013; Uzunboylu & Karagozlu, 2015; Betihavas et al., 2015; Gilboy et al., 2015).