Impacts of a flipped classroom with a smart learning diagnosis system on students' learning performance, perception, and problem solving ability in a software engineering course

Abstract

In recent years, many institutions have announced the significance of software development for countries, societies, and individuals. In developing software, various unpredictable problems are often encountered, especially in developing large-scale and complex software. To reduce the possibility of these problems occurring, it is important for students to apply software engineering technology to scientifically define the criteria, models, and procedures needed in the software development process. Therefore, it is important to cultivate students to learn software engineering concepts and technologies. However, since the course duration is limited by the semester, most teachers can only conduct a teacher-centered learning environment to teach theoretical concepts to students. Most students cannot achieve high-order thinking skills and apply software engineering technology to solve practical problems after learning in this environment. As mentioned above, the aim of this study is to apply an innovative pedagogy, called a flipped classroom, to conduct a learner-centered learning environment in a software engineering course. Moreover, a smart learning diagnosis system was developed to support this pedagogy in this course. An experiment was conducted on a software engineering course at a university in Taiwan to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The students in the experimental group learned with the flipped-classroom learning approach, while the students in the control group learned with the traditional-classroom learning approach. The experimental results show that, in comparison with the traditional-classroom learning approach, the proposed approach significantly improved the students' learning achievement, learning motivation, learning attitude, and problem solving ability.