Since the pandemic, more professors in schools and universities seem to have embraced “flipped learning,” the approach of asking students to watch lecture videos before class so that class time can be used for active learning.
Proponents say the model improves student outcomes by encouraging more interaction between students and teachers, and many studies have been done to measure the effectiveness of the approach. So a group of teachers recently conducted a meta-analysis to try to gauge how well flipped learning is working.
The study considered 173 studies of flipped learning, as well as 46 previous meta-analyses of the approach. And while many of the studies showed gains for students in some cases, the researchers concluded that flipped learning is not delivering on its promise.
“Current levels of enthusiasm for flipped learning do not match and far outweigh the wide variability of scientific evidence in its favor,” the article argues.
In fact, the authors came to the surprising conclusion that many cases of flipped learning involve more time spent in passive learning than the traditional lecturing model, because some teachers assign short video lectures and spend some class time lecturing to prepare for classroom activities. As the authors say: “Indeed, it appears that implementations of flipped learning perpetuate the things they claim to reduce, i.e., passive learning.”
The large meta-analysis considered flipped learning experiments conducted in elementary schools, secondary schools, and universities, with the majority of studies in higher education settings.
The biggest surprise for the researchers as they coded each research project was realizing how many different versions of flipped learning exist, said John Hattie, a professor emeritus at the University of Melbourne and a co-author of the study. “The hype is convincing, it’s seductive, but the implementation of the hype is not,” he said. “It has been implemented so variably.”
Another surprise, Hattie said, was that the more active learning that takes place in a flipped classroom, the worse the outcome. He attributes this to the fact that many teachers using the model do not test whether students are actually learning the material presented in the lecture videos, so some students who skip the videos or watch them double speed Coming to class unprepared for activities.
Researchers believe that flipped learning has merit, if done carefully. They end their article by presenting a flipped learning model they refer to as “fail, flip, fix, and feed,” which they say applies the most effective aspects they learned from their analysis. Basically, they argue that students should be challenged with a problem even if they can’t solve it correctly because they haven’t learned the material yet, and then not solving it will motivate them to watch the class for the necessary information. Class time can then be used to correct student misconceptions, with a combination of a short lecture and student activities. Finally, instructors evaluate student work and give feedback.
I hope our article does not dismiss the underlying ideas [flipped learning] because they are very powerful ideas,” Hattie said.
“Hey, we’re all on the same team here”
Fans of flipped learning had some questions about the new study’s conclusions.
Among them is Robert Talbert, a professor in the mathematics department at Grand Valley State University and author of the book “Flipped Learning: A Guide for Higher Education Teachers.”
“It sort of gets flipped learning educators up their sleeves, and I thought that was super unnecessary,” Talbert said. “I wanted to reach out to the authors and say, ‘Hey, we’re all on the same team here.’ They are part of the group that does flipped learning.”
He says he welcomes a hard look at the research, but argued that the study left out some known research on active learning. And he said that by looking at flipped learning at K-12 schools and colleges, the analysis ended up comparing apples and oranges.
“It’s a great starting point for discussion, and I’ll never say we can’t post things that are critical to flipped learning,” Talbert said. “But the overall message from the paper was: ‘You’re all doing reverse learning wrong, and we’re doing it right.’ I didn’t think that was fair to people who do flipped learning.”
The paper’s lead author, Kapur Manu, a professor of learning sciences and higher education at ETH Zurich, responded to that criticism by saying he wanted to push back against the uneven implementation of a popular teaching trend.
“I’m on the science team, and this is what empirical science is showing,” he said in an interview. “The contribution is that we actually coded the types of activities” that were included in the flipped learning efforts. “When you do that, you find that active learning wasn’t as present as it should have been.”
Talbert praised the model the researchers presented, but said it looks a lot like an article by Bertrand Schneider and Paulo Blikstein that the investigators cited but did not discuss in their meta-analysis.
Hattie, one of the co-authors of the meta-analysis, acknowledged that her model arose in part from the experiments they examined. “The new model came particularly from first author Kapur Manu’s extensive work, and he and I learned from this paper and others in building the model,” she said.
And Hattie argued that the unequal outcomes of flipped learning held no matter which sector of education was considered: K-12 or higher education.
One of the hopes of the paper, he said, is to foster a more detailed understanding of which parts of flipped learning work best so that those who jump to a modern teaching strategy can be effective.
