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Lars Filipsson, Mikael Cronhjort, Maria Weurlander
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
We have been experimenting with interactive teaching in Calculus since 2012 at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. We report on an effort to measure the effect of replacing traditional lecture-based teaching in a Calculus course with a flipped classroom model, involving preparatory videos with online quizzes and interactive teaching sessions.
In order to compare the two teaching formats we designed a Calculus Baseline Test, a concept inventory for calculus, that was given as pretest and posttest to the students in a flipped classroom group as well as to the students in a lecture-based version of the same course. We also used a questionnaire measuring student engagement, and analyzed student achievement on the final exam.
On the Calculus Baseline Test we calculated the normalized gain for the two groups, flipped vs lecture, in the standard way by taking the posttest score minus the pretest score divided by the maximum possible gain. We found that the normalized gain was 15% higher in the flipped classroom group.
Our engagement questionnaire showed a similar difference between the two groups: the students in the flipped classroom group scored on average 10% higher on the engagement questionnaire.
Analyzing the final exam, we compared the results on the final exam with the results on the final exam previous year for the relevant student study programs. In the previous year the teaching in the course was lecture-based for all of these study programs. We found that the students of the flipped classroom group performed way better than expected, with a substantial decrease in failure rate. In some study programs the failure rate dropped by more than 50%.