Investigating effects of teachers in flipped classroom: a randomized controlled trial study of classroom level heterogeneity

Abstract

The increased popularity of flipped classroom in higher education warrants more thorough investigation of the pedagogical format’s effects on student learning. This paper utilizes two iterations of a randomized field experiment to study the effects of flipped classroom on student learning specifically focusing on heterogeneous treatment effects across the important classroom-level factor of teachers. The empirical setting is an undergraduate macroeconomics course with 933 students and 11 teachers. Our findings show a positive yet insignificant average effect of flipped classroom on both pass rate and final exam grades. We further find substantial shifts in the ranking of the participating teachers’ effectiveness when comparing traditional and flipped classroom conditions, which suggests that the most successful teacher in a traditional teaching environment is not necessarily the most successful teacher in a flipped classroom environment.