From reflective thinking to learning engagement awareness: A reflective thinking promoting approach to improve students’ dance performance, self‐efficacy and task load in flipped learning

Abstract

AbstractIn traditional dance teaching, teachers’ demonstration generally takes up most of the in‐class time, which reduces the opportunities for students to practice. Therefore, researchers have started to adopt flipped learning to increase the in‐class time for students’ practice and teachers’ guidance. However, there are some problems associated with the conventional approach to flipped learning; these problems include students’ lack of preparation before class which affects their engagement in the in‐class activity; lack of guidance when self‐learning; no instant assistance when encountering problems; and lack of reflection. To address these problems, the current study proposes a reflective thinking promoting approach to instruct the students to understand the pre‐class materials and to strengthen their reflection and the interflow among peers in flipped learning. A total of 129 university students were recruited in the present study. They were divided into the experimental group which adopted the annotation, reflection, questioning and interflow (ARQI) approach and the control group which adopted the previous flipped learning approach. The results revealed that ARQI could significantly enhance the students’ dance performance. The interview also revealed that ARQI promoted the students’ reflection. Moreover, the higher self‐efficacy students tended to gain more benefits from the flipped learning approach than those with lower self‐efficacy. Lastly, following the ARQI steps to finish the pre‐class learning, students were aware that they were required to put more mental and temporal efforts into the class. Practitioner NotesWhat is already known about this topic Educators have questioned the quality of dance teaching that mainly adopts a directive teaching approach in which students just do as they are told or mirror the teacher, rather than a dialogical or student‐centered approach which allows students to dance based on their understanding and interpretation of the theme (Sims & Erwin, 2012). Flipped learning enables students to have more time to practice and interact with the teacher and peers by shifting the in‐class lectures to pre‐class self‐learning. Researchers have pointed out that insufficient preparation in the pre‐class learning stage could significantly affect students’ in‐class learning performance, which is a big challenge of implementing flipped learning. What this paper adds A reflective thinking‐promoting mechanism is proposed for implementing flipped dance to instruct students to understand the pre‐class materials and to strengthen their reflection and the interflow among peers. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach promoted the students’ reflective thinking as well as their dance performance. Implications for practice and/or policy Self‐efficacy plays an important role in flipped learning. When teachers implement relevant strategies, more focus should be placed on students with low self‐efficacy. Forming the reflective thinking skill is important, but attainable; it needs students’ increased mental and temporal efforts. Further investigations on the effects of employing the approach in other performing arts courses from different aspects, such as the interactive and behavioral patterns of students in the pre‐class and in‐class stages, are needed.