Flipping Pedagogy 101 - a) understanding 'why' not just 'how'

This post is a summary of the first part of a workshop that I gave recently at VICE-PHEC (Variety in Chemistry and Physics Education Conferences). I plan to write up the rest of the workshop as another blog post- watch this space!

The slides are available here: Slides for workshop

Teachers need to know 'why' not just 'how'


The idea that teaching should be research informed and evidence based is becoming mainstream -  the blogger 'academic teacher' makes the case for this particularly eloquently.

But there is also evidence that implementing active learning pedagogies can be far from straight forward. Dancy and Henderson have done a lot of work in this area in the context of physics (in America). They found that as many as a third of instructors that tried an evidence based pedagogy subsequently stopped using it. One of the reasons that was given was that 'they tried it and it didn't work'. Dancy and Henderson also found that  ¼ to ½ of instructors deviate significantly from established design of evidence-based teaching approaches (2009). Does this explain why active learning didn't 'work' for some people? This may be part of the reason, but I don't think it is as simple as that.

There is now overwhelming evidence that creating opportunities for students to be active in their learning leads to better outcomes than traditional approaches which typically involve students passively listening to lectures and writing notes. The seminal study by Hake (1998) which involved over 5000 students from 62 different physics courses is also one of the most influential, however many recent research studies including a meta analysis in Proceedings of National Academy of Science journal (Freeman et al., 2014) of 225 studies also found significant learning benefits for students in active learning courses.

Hake's main result is clear (green is active learning courses, large gains, while red is traditional courses, lower gains), however the detail of Hake's results are as interesting as the big picture. They found that while 'traditional' teaching always led to small learning gains, using active learning didn't necessarily guarantee a large gain. For a small proportion of courses, using active learning strategies led to similar or even worse gains than the best performing traditional courses.

What is going on here?

Perhaps this is simply that instructors are using evidence based strategies in the 'wrong' way, as suggested by Dancy and Henderson. However, my current research has found that there can be a significant variation in the way that active learning and peer-instruction is implemented  - even between lectures in the same lecture course taught by the same lecturer. This research involved studying lectures given by an experienced physics lecturer who has used a flipped/active learning approach for a number of years. His courses consistently achieve good learning gains implying that the variations in implementation are there by choice and picked for a good reason, rather than happening by chance. A close analysis shows two distinct factors affecting his use of active learning during the lecture. The first is the course content (whether the topic is to be covered in depth or at a more introductory level) and the second is the need to respond to students' difficulties and questions as they arise. For instance if students are struggling with a concept or ask a question about a problem then he will spend more time discussing it.

The take home message seems to be that the way active learning is used in practice depends on the context – where context can be everything from the course material, the assessment protocol, the way the course fits with other courses that students are taking, to the prior experiences and knowledge of the students which are reflected 'in the moment' in their difficulties with the material.

The second point is that the devil is in the detail. There are many descriptions on the internet describing how to 'do' active learning which can look very much like recipes. Here are steps of Peer-Instruction according  to Mazur and Schell.  However even within this substantial variation is possible. Should you present the pre-course material as a video or as text? With a quiz, or not – online or at the start of the lecture? What should you cover in the mini-lecture? What type of questions should you ask? How do you know when to move to a discussion or when to move on to another topic? What should you do during the peer-discussion- listen to students' discussions, join in, or stay out of it? Etc etc.

I think the problem is therefore not the deviation from the evidence based protocol per se that is the issue – but rather if an instructor is going to do something different, (and as I've already said, that is highly likely given that doing is influenced by the context) then they need to understand why they are doing what they are doing, not just how or what they are doing. Every context is different. The only way to make success more likely is to be aware of what your students already know, how they learn, and how your decisions will impact on that learning.

References


Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23), 8410–8415.

Hake, R. R. (1998). Interactive-engagement versus traditional methods: A six-thousand-student survey of mechanics test data for introductory physics courses. American Journal of Physics, 66, 64–74.

Henderson, C., & Dancy, M. H. (2009). Impact of physics education research on the teaching of introductory quantitative physics in the United States. Physical Review Special Topics-Physics Education Research, 5(2), 020107.

Flipping Pedagogy 101 - a) understanding 'why' not just 'how'by Anna Wood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.