Student Engagement in a Flipped Secondary Mathematics Classroom

Abstract

Many students are becoming increasingly disengaged in school, particularly in mathematics. This is an important problem as lack of engagement may threaten students’ achievement and performance in mathematics. A flipped learning pedagogy, which encourages students to take an active role in learning mathematics, has become a widely researched topic in recent years. However, few empirical studies to date have focused on the influence of flipped learning on student engagement in secondary mathematics classrooms. This qualitatively oriented study aimed to extend existing research on the role of flipped learning in behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement by adopting a social constructivist perspective to examine a secondary mathematics classroom. The participants were 33 high school students and their mathematics teacher, from whom data were gathered using multiple empirical methods. The results indicate that a flipped learning pedagogy has the potential to play a positive role in behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement as it provides learners with many possibilities for the learning of mathematics. However, to successfully flip learning, it is important to have a well-developed interactive design and to encourage social interaction in mathematics teaching and learning. Engagement was found to be negatively affected when the students had a negative perception of flipped learning and failed to complete the pre-class tasks. Overall, our results indicate that mathematics education can benefit from a flipped learning pedagogy as it has the potential to strengthen students’ engagement and mathematics learning in a social environment.