Ganz-Benjaminsen, Melanie

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12Can the flipped classroom enhance studentlearning?Melanie Ganz-BenjaminsenDepartment of Computer ScienceUniversity of CopenhagenIntroductionThe flipped classroom (FC) is an interesting teaching tool and its usersclaim they can engage their students more, increase the students’ learningopportunities and get instant feedback on their own teaching at the sametime. An in depth treatment on the rise of FC as well as the theoreticalbackground is given in Bishop et al., 2013. The authors also highlight thekey concept behind FC as in being pre-recorded lectures or reading materialthat can be assigned to students as homework, leaving class time open forinteractive learning activities—activities that cannot be automated or com-puterized. Specifically, Bishop et al., 2013, define FC as interactive grouplearning activities inside the classroom, and direct computer-based indivi-dual instruction outside the classroom. While Bishop et al., 2013, in theiranalysis strictly exclude designs that do not employ videos as an outsideof the classroom activity, in general assigning reading outside of class iscommonly employed in FC and will be employed in our study as well.A front figure for FC at the University of Copenhagen is ProfessorJan H. Jensen from the department of chemistry (Jensen, 2014). Profes-sor Jensen’s approach (Jensen, 2015) lets the students acquire knowledgebefore they come to class by watching videos or reading a book and checksthe knowledge they have acquired by performing a quiz at home. The lec-ture then serves as a question and answer session where he discusses theissues/points that most of the students missed. He picks up a common ques-tion/misconception and starts clarifying the issue but first lets the studentstry to understand the issue by discussing it with their neighbors (peer in-140 Melanie Ganz-Benjaminsenstruction). He then asks questions via a student-response system (SRS). TheSRS can be used to ask the students a question, to receive their answers inreal time by smartphones, tablet or web browsers and see their responseslive in class. After students have discussed for a short while, he lets themvote on the issue to check if the knowledge was acquired correctly. If morethan, 75% of the students get the answer correct, he moves on to the nextissue. If less than 75% but more than 40% give the correct answer, he dis-cusses further and lets them vote again. If less than 40% of the students getthe answer right, he then gives an additional short lecture on the topic to en-sure the correct understanding of the issue. According to Professor Jensen’sexperience (Jensen, 2014) this type of teaching format and the use of SRScan counteract the one-way communication of traditional lectures and pro-vide a break every now and then, which is necessary to maintain studentconcentration. Furthermore, SRS can stimulate class discussions and peer-to-peer instructions as the students become active participants in their ownlearning. A nice feature is that the teaching format also works well for largeclasses, but of course the Q&A session needs to be better prepared if theclass is larger.In this work, FC is applied in the course Medical Image Analysis. Afew lectures are changed from “knowledge-dissemination” lectures to FClectures that support a more active learning approach. The goal of this isto check if student learning is enhanced after the use of FC. This is evalu-ated by two quantitative quizzes before and after the lectures as well as aqualitative interview afterwards.BackgroundThe course used for this experiment is Medical Image Analysis (MIA,2017) at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Copen-hagen. The course is a 7,5 ECTS course running in block 1 and one ofthe restricted elective courses in the Master of Science (MSc) program inComputer Science. Furthermore, the course is also an elective course in theMSc in Physics program for the study area Medical Physics. The teachingformat mentioned in the course description consists of lectures, exercises,and assignments. In practice, this results in two lectures (Monday and Fri-day morning) of about 2 hours each accompanied by one afternoon session(Tuesday) with a teacher present, where the students can get help with theassignments. The expectation that is communicated at the start of the course12 Can the flipped classroom enhance student learning? 141is that the students should read the relevant parts of the course book beforethe lecture, and hence the “lectures” should be quite interactive. Unfortu-nately, even though the intention of the course is to be very interactive,the mere request to have read the relevant chapters in the book before thelecture, does not lead the students to do this. This in turn often leads toa one-way lecture that might sometimes be interspersed with study groupwork, but where the students mostly only sit and listen. While the course ingeneral receives good evaluations, it seems the students lack the ability totransfer the learned knowledge to a new context such as project work afterthe course. This is a problem for the master students attending the course,since they should be able to transfer what they have learned in the course toresearch or Master projects that they conduct in the department of computerscience.In the interest of congruency and to avoid confusing the students, FCis tested in two lectures. The first is a short (20 minute) expert lecture ona freely chosen topic by the lecturer. The second lecture is a full lecture (2hours) and covers the topic of basic medical statistics. This lecture is largelyindependent of the other content covered in the course and therefore offersthe possibility to test FC in an isolated fashion.Fig. 12.1. An overview of the experimental setup. Lecture 1 and 2 were given oneweek apart. In between, the students had to fill out a quiz on the Absalon platformthat checked their knowledge about basic statistics. After the second lecture, theywere asked to take the same quiz again. Finally, a student was interviewed regardingher experience of the flipped classroom approach.142 Melanie Ganz-BenjaminsenMethodsThe experimental setup to test if FC improves student learning was plannedand discussed together with Camilla Østerberg beforehand. The study setupconsisted of two lectures interspersed with quantitative quizzes and com-pleted by a qualitative interview. An overview of the experimental setup isshown in Figure 12.1.The first lecture introduced the students to the lecturer and to a simpli-fied version of FC. The topic of the lecture was an aggression project car-ried out at the Neurobiology Research Unit at Rigshospitalet (www.nru.dk).The students received a scientific article (da Cunha-Bang et al., 2017) de-scribing the project as well as a link to a documentary about the project byDanmarks Radio [Vold på hjernen] beforehand. Small quizzes and feedbacksession were used throughout the lecture in order to introduce the studentsto a flipped classroom type of teaching approach as well as to acquaintthe students with the student-response system (SRS) used in the lectures,Shakespeak (https://www.shakespeak.com/). The first lecture was also usedto get demographic information about the students.After the first lecture, the students were assigned a quiz via Absalon thatchecked their knowledge about basic statistical tests. The quiz consisted often multiple-choice questions. A full list of all questions and answers can befound in the supplementary material. There was no time limit on the quiz,the correct answers were not accessible to the students afterwards and theyhad only one attempt at performing the quiz. The questions were shownone at a time and shuffling of the questions not possible. The students hadto hand-in the quiz five days after the first lecture and two days beforethe second lecture. Additionally, the students were given literature (VanEmden, 2012) to refresh their knowledge if they came upon areas of thequiz where they felt a need to do so.The second lecture, given one week after the first, introduced the stu-dents to basic statistical tests used in medical imaging. The lecture con-sisted of a very short introduction of theory and then a series of exampleproblems where the students had to vote which statistical test would beappropriate for the example problem. After each small quiz, the exampleproblems were discussed and solved together in class. The second half ofthe lecture consisted of interactive group work in groups of four to fivestudents where the students designed flowcharts guiding them to the appro-priate statistical test given some example data. Finally, the students applied12 Can the flipped classroom enhance student learning? 143their flowcharts to a final problem that had been introduced at the very be-ginning of the lecture.After the second lecture, the students had to complete another quiz,which was identical with the pre-lecture quiz and again checked their know-ledge.Statistical significance of improvement between quiz 1 and 2 was testedwith a non-parametric one-sided (left-tailed) Mann Whitney U-test due toa lack of normality of the scores.ResultsBasic demographic information about the students was collected in the firstlecture. Based on the student population from previous years, the studentswere asked to identify their main field of study between computer science,math, physics or other fields. In the current class the students main fieldof studies were computer science (24%) and physics (4%) as well as otherfields (72%). The students from the other field were mainly students inbioinformatics. The students were also asked to identify their seniority andthe majority of students was in the second year of their Master of Scienceeducation (83.3%) whereas a few first year (8.3%) and bachelor studentscomprised the rest of the class (8.3%).Next, the quantitative results based on the first and second ten-questionquiz on Absalon will be described. Thirty-three students filled out the pre-lecture quiz on Absalon and all of them completed it before the flippedclassroom lecture. The average student performance was a score of 7.76 ±0.29 out of 10. Thirty-four students completed the post-lecture quiz on Ab-salon. Three students completed it right after the lecture, while the majorityof class submitted the second quiz within the following days. The averagestudent performance on the second quiz was 8.36 ± 0.27 out of 10.The quiz can further be analyzed in two fashions. Either looking at theindividual students or looking at the individual questions in the pre- andpost-lecture versions of the quiz. Thirty students filled out both the pre-and post-lecture quizzes. When comparing the individual students’ scorespre- and post-lecture, they show a significant improvement after the lecture(p<0.05). Means and standard deviations of the two quizzes as well as theoutcome of the statistical test are shown in Table 12.1. When examining theten different items in the quiz, the students improved their performance onaverage by 11% for seven questions, while they declined in performance144 Melanie Ganz-Benjaminsenon average by 5% for three questions. The largest improvement was onquestion 7 where correct answers increased by 30%. As example, the threequestions with the largest improvements are shown in Table 12.2.Table 12.1. An overview of the student performance in terms of the average stu-dent score and its standard deviation in the pre- and post-lecture quiz on Absalon.Statistical significance of improvement between quiz 1 and 2 was assessed with anon-parametric one-sided (left-tailed) Mann Whitney U-test and yielded a signifi-cant improvement.Quiz 1 Quiz 2 p-value of one-sidedMann Whitney U-testStudentPerformance (mean ± std)7.77 ± 0.31 8.57 ± 0.27 0.033Table 12.2. An overview of the three (out of ten) items where the correct studentanswers improved the most between the pre- and post-lecture quiz.students grades are normally distributed around an average that we call mu. You compare their SAT scores to the national average of 500. What of the following statements is true?””My friend, Bob, believes that his supermarket's prices are lower than mine. We construct a list of identical items and purchase them at our respective stores every week for two months. We realize that our items' prices are normally distributed. Then Bob wants to know if his hypothesis is supported. What should he use?”63 % 79 % 16 % Quiz 1 –Correctanswers Quiz 2 –Correctanswers Improvement in correct answers ”What is an example of a statistical test I could use if I have non-normal distributed data?”67 % 97 % 30 % ”You are a high school teacher interested in how your students compare to others in college readiness. The 55 % 68 % 13 % Finally, we will describe the results based on a qualitative interviewwith a student. Four students were approached for an interview, but onlyone student could make the time for it. During the interview the student was12 Can the flipped classroom enhance student learning? 145asked if she preferred the more active type of lesson exhibited in the statis-tics lecture that involves group work, if she had a better learning experienceby being forced to use the mathematical concepts in examples/quizzes rightaway and finally if she had experienced this type of active learning or FCbefore. The student answered that she definitely preferred the more activetype of lesson. She also liked to use the concepts right away to ensure sheunderstood them and could apply the newly acquired knowledge. The stu-dent has had classes using FC before and mentioned that she felt bettersuited to this type of learning than passive lectures.DiscussionWhile the quantitative (the two quizzes) as well as the qualitative (the in-terview) results indicate that student learning improved, this needs to beinterpreted cautiously. The most severe limitation of drawing strong con-clusions is in the single arm design of our study. A randomized design ase.g. presented in Wozny, 2018, where half the students experience a tradi-tional lecture, while the other half are exposed to FC would clearly havebeen preferable. This was unfortunately not possible due to the small num-ber of students in this course (approx. 30). In general, the small sample sizeis also a limitation for the validity of our statistical finding. While we tryto mitigate the small sample size by using non-parametric tests, a largersample would allow stronger conclusions.Furthermore, it is not clear if the positive learning effect and studentspositive perception stems directly from FC or simply from an active learn-ing approach. In a recent review of the literature across higher educationO’Flaherty et al., 2015, noted that much of the emerging evidence of im-proved academic performance might be indirectly related to FC. For ex-ample, Jensen et al., 2015, compared a flipped and non-flipped approachand found no significant difference between either approaches when bothgroups employed active learning techniques in class. Again, our small studycannot address this issue.Indirectly, there are though some clear benefits of FC that became ap-parent in our study. First, since the class size was small and the number ofstudents known, the lecturer could ensure that all students participate in thelecture quizzes by simply waiting for the same number of votes to comein as there were students present. This ”forces” the students to participate.Even though this doesn’t ensure that they participate actively, it makes it146 Melanie Ganz-Benjaminsenmore likely that they do. Second, the group work in the second half of thestatistics lecture engaged the students in a different fashion. They not onlyhad to answer pre-defined questions, but also had to design a flow chartthemselves. This allowed them to be creative and think about the topic athand in an alternative fashion which should also support knowledge reten-tion. Finally, after both lectures five students approached me and asked forproject or thesis topic work. By now it is clear that two students will begina master project under my supervision in spring 2019. Two master studentprojects from a mere contact of two lectures seems also to show that thelectures were interesting. Whether the students interest in project work wasinspired by the topic of the lectures or the lecture style is unknown.ConclusionThe experience with testing a flipped classroom approach was thoroughlypositive and is encouraging me to re-design other parts of the course tosupport either FC or at the least an active learning approach.For future work, other lecturers at computer science will be presentedwith our results to stimulate them to try out FC in their courses, since manyof the courses at the department could be re-designed to follow an activelearning approach. Overall, I gained a lot of experience with modern teach-ing methods during the course on teaching in higher education and thisexperiment and am hoping to apply that knowledge in my future teachingendeavors.AcknowledgementsThe author is grateful to Camilla Østerberg, Pieter Jan Kerstens and MartinNørgaard for helpful hints and valuable suggestions.ReferencesBishop, J. L., & Verleger, M. A. (2013, June). The flipped classroom: Asurvey of the research. In ASEE national conference proceedings, Atlanta,GA (Vol. 30, No. 9, pp. 1-18).da Cunha-Bang, S., Hjordt, L. V., Perfalk, E., Beliveau, V., Bock, C., Lehel,S., ... & Knudsen, G. M. (2017). Serotonin 1B receptor binding is associated12 Can the flipped classroom enhance student learning? 147with trait anger and level of psychopathy in violent offenders. Biologicalpsychiatry, 82(4), 267-274.Jensen, J.H. (2014). I lecture no more. Keynote speech at “Make a differ-ence - Teach and learn with technology 2014”, Copenhagen 12 November2014.Jensen, J. H. (2015). My flipped classroom: what I did and how I did it (No.e1546). PeerJ PrePrints.Jensen, J. L., Kummer, T. A., & Godoy, P. D. D. M. (2015). Improve-ments from a flipped classroom may simply be the fruits of active learning.CBE—Life Sciences Education, 14(1), ar5.O’Flaherty, J., & Phillips, C. (2015). The use of flipped classrooms inhigher education: A scoping review. The internet and higher education,25, 85-95.MIA (2017). Medical Image Analysis, NDAK10005U, http://kurser.ku.dk/course/ndak10005u.Van Emden, H. F. (2012). Statistics for terrified biologists. John Wiley &Sons.Vold på hjernen (2017), https://www.dr.dk/tv/se/kriminel-hjerne/vold-pa-hjernen/vold-pa-hjernenWozny, N., Balser, C., & Ives, D. (2018). Evaluating the flipped classroom:A randomized controlled trial. The Journal of Economic Education, 49(2),115-129.Supplementary material to “Can the flipped classroom enhance student learning?”Quiz questions 148 Melanie Ganz-BenjaminsenA

Can the flipped classroom enhance student learning?

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Can the flipped classroom enhance student learning?

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