The effect of the flipped classroom on learning outcomes of college students in an introductory economics course

Among the seven lessons of the introductory economics course, the flipped-classroom teaching style is applied to the 5th, 6th and 7th lessons of one section, and the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th lessons of the other section.

2022-04-11

2022-07-18

the quiz scores and the final exam scores

We conduct our experiment in the 2022 Spring semester in “Introduction to Economics,” a required course for freshmen in the Department of Economics. The experiment is conducted in two sections of the course, Section C and Section D, taught by the same instructor, where students are randomly assigned to these sections by the administration office of the economics department. In this course, fourteen lessons are divided into seven each. In Section C, the first seven lessons were for “introduction to microeconomics and macroeconomics” and the second seven lessons were for “introduction to social economics”, and the other way around in Section D. The experiment is conducted in the microeconomics-macroeconomics part of the course. To ensure equal learning opportunities for students, all students experience both the flipped classroom and standard classroom, and only the timing was different. More specifically, the flipped-classroom teaching style is applied to the 5th, 6th and 7th lessons in Section C, and the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th lessons in Section D.

The class meets every Monday. In the standard classroom, students are asked to read the assigned pages of the textbook and supplementary readings prior to class. During class, the instructor gives lecture in the classroom. After class, as homework assignments, students are required to submit their answers to the practice problems, and their questions about the lecture. A multiple-choice quiz is given one week after the class.
In the flipped classroom, students are asked to watch the video lectures prior to class. As a homework assignment, students are required to submit a question about the video lectures. During class, students work on practice problems in a group of six students. The instructor and three teaching assistants are walking around in the classroom or hopping around the breakout rooms to help students and to take questions from students. At the end of the class time, students take a multiple-choice quiz.

Staffs in the administration office of the economics department assign each freshmen students into four sections, A, B, C, and D, based on the information of students' college entrance methods so that in each section the share of the students with the same entrance methods are almost equal.

individual students

Yes

61 groups of students, with one group having six students.

366 students

31 groups of students in Section C are control groups (taught by the style of standard classroom) and 30 groups of students in Section D are treatment groups (taught by the style of the flipped classroom) for lessons 1, 2, 3, and 4.
31 groups of students in Section C are treatment groups (taught by the style of the flipped classroom) and 30 groups of students in Section D are control groups (taught by the style of standard classroom) for lessons 5, 6, and 7.