Effect of Instructional Methods on Student Performance in Flipped Classroom

Abstract

This full paper in the research to practice category reports an effort to investigate the impact of instructional methods on the student performance in a flipped classroom. Flipped classroom is a pedagogical approach that has received a significant research attention in recent times. Yet, current studies have not explored the effect of instructional methods, made available by internet and multimedia technologies, on students' performance in flipped classroom. This creates a gap in both the knowledge and practice of flipped classroom. In our effort to fill this gap and contribute to knowledge, we designed an exploratory study to investigate how each of the five instructional methods used in engineering education affect students' performance in a flipped classroom. Accordingly, we registered 35 students into an Information Systems (IS) core course and divided them into two classes (identified using their section codes, 01 and 1E) taught by the same professor. Class 01 (the experimental group) was taught with a flipped model while Class 1E (the control group) was taught with the traditional model. Data was collected from two sources, students' grades and questionnaire responses. After analyzing the data, we made some findings that would be useful to professors practicing flipped classroom. We summarize the key findings as follows: (a) Instructional methods that are interactive, interdependent and peer-focused are most preferred by students and offer greater learning experience. (b) Students who indicated Connect Interactive as their most preferred instructional method, in flipped classroom, performed better than their peers by a range of 25%. We consider this study to be exploratory in nature because of its relatively small sample size. Yet, we provide discussions, analysis and recommendations that can inform the practice of flipped pedagogy. It also provides a foundation for further research on the relationship between instructional methods and student performance in flipped classroom.