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In Defense of the Flip
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[originally posted 12/2/2014]
It's that time of the year again where the turkey has been roasted, eaten, sandwiched, casseroled, and sworn off till next year (or next month for some); and if you are in academia you are now preparing for final exams and course/instructor assessment. It was just earlier this week that I passed out our standard institutional assessment forms to my first flipped biochemistry course and because I wanted to gauge the various blended learning techniques I employed over the semester, I added my own additional assessment. In this survey, I asked my students to rate the various tools I utilized in order to "help deepen student understanding on a variety of biochemistry related topics and to facilitate the development of critical thinking skills". These tools included: video lectures, 10 minute "muddiest point" lectures in class, Sapling Online Homework, lecture powerpoints, Facebook "Journal Club" Discussions, Facebook Course Management, exam study guides, exam study sessions, POGIL workbook activities, case studies, metabolic pathway posters, and the Moodle course management page. Students were asked to rate these tools on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being not beneficial at all and 10 being very beneficial) and then comment on the tool they found most beneficial and least beneficial. The average ratings for these tools can be seen in the graph below.
The standard deviations for these responses where quite large, ranging from 1.8 to 3.0, which to me indicated that these students varied greatly on the tools they appreciated, which should be expected since these tools target a wide range of learning styles. However, I will note that I inadvertently left out one of the most important tools - the textbook. It would have been great to see if there was a correlation between students who valued the lecture videos as little to no benefit but highly valued the textbook, and would be something I look into next year. And while the overall averages may seem disheartening at first glance (particularly the POGIL workbook and video lectures), reading the students comments have been very reassuring; so I wanted to take a moment and discuss some of the common disparities between student perceived gains/values and instructor perceived gains/values that I noticed as a result of this assessment. In their comments students asked me to:
Improve lecture videos (so that they are) strong enough to stand on their own w/o needing text"
"POGIL - some concepts, actually most, were too complicated for the scope of this course"
Students are missing the experience of science as the exchange and evolution of ideas, and gender and ethnic issues are being ignored in the design of courses. Poor performers withdraw from learning, and even the best performers may disengage because they are not challenged. The results are low levels of learning and high levels of attrition... To address this situation and to help students become better learners in our courses, it is essential to recognize that education has two components, content and process, and that the process component often is not given adequate attention. Science education needs to be concerned equally with both the structure of knowledge, which is the content component, and with the development of the skills for acquiring, applying, and generating knowledge, which is the process component."
I believe to help our students become better at processing the knowledge they gain from lecture, we have to push our students hard, make them uncomfortable, and challenge them. Therefore, when I was reading these comments such as "they weren't beneficial because there weren't clear answers, and they were pretty extreme cases, some really hard to understand", actually pleases me as an instructor to no end. But I will agree with the students in that it is important to incorporate some sort of post-activity reflection/discussion, and I will be spending time during the Holiday break figuring out how to do this given the in-class time constraints (and, as always, am open to suggestions from my colleagues).
"I think the class should be more lecture based. While the flipped idea is fun, I think that for a class with this much information, we need a lecture"
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In Defense of the Flip, Part III
In Defense of the Flip, Part II
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Biochemistry
6 -
Biology
14 -
Case Studies
15 -
Chemistry
112 -
Environmental Science
4 -
General Chemistry
20 -
Genetics
1 -
Intro & Prep Chemistry
10 -
Math & Stats
15 -
Organic Chemistry
9 -
Physics
6 -
Tech
18 -
Virtual Learning
9