CAN UNDERGRADUATES LEARN JUST AS EFFECTIVELY FROM VIDEOS AS LECTURES? INVESTIGATION OF A FLIPPED PHYSICAL GEOLOGY CLASS

A flipped class format provides opportunities to shift traditional lecture material to pre-class assignments and thus free time in class to leverage the benefits of active learning strategies to improve student learning. We transformed a large (n~90) introductory physical geology course to a flipped class learning environment by progressively increasing the proportion of course material presented to the students as preclass assignments over four semesters. In the flipped class setting, course content was shared through a series of short online videos and associated multiple choice and short answer questions. Students were expected to complete these low stakes assignments as a component of their course grade. We used the time saved in class to focus on more challenging content and/or add additional learning activities but we did not increase the amount of content discussed in the course. We investigated the impact of this change in instruction on student performance on midterm summative exam questions based on: 1) content that was formerly presented in class but that is now presented exclusively online or is first presented in video and also presented in class; 2) content that was formerly presented in class and that was still presented in class but with some video content and additional activities; and, 3) content with no change in presentation in either preclass or in-class settings.

Results demonstrated that students demonstrated at least equal levels of content mastery between control and treatment semesters on the exams. Additionally, many concepts that were augmented with additional activities elicited significant gains in student exam performance. Overall, findings show only neutral or positive performance gains as a result of removing some content from in-class presentations and adding in-class active learning exercises. Results were not universal among content questions with some topics consistently receiving a larger proportion of correct answers than others, perhaps representing a contrast in question difficulty or differential effectiveness of class learning activities.