Panel Paper:
The Impact of "Flipping the Classroom" on Academic Performance: Evidence from a Randomized Trial at the United States Military Academy
Saturday, November 10, 2018
Lincoln 3 - Exhibit Level (Marriott Wardman Park)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
In a flipped classroom, an increasingly popular pedagogical model, students view a video lecture at home and work on exercises with the instructor during class time. Advocates of the flipped classroom claim the practice improves student learning by increasing student engagement, improving student-teacher interaction, and helping students master concepts through real-time feedback. We conduct a flipped classroom randomized controlled trial (RCT) with 1,300 students at West Point, in 29 sections of a core Economics and 51 sections of a core Mathematics course. We find that the flipped classroom produced gains of 0.3 standard deviations in Math and no effect in Economics. The differential effects might be due to differences in the nature of the material: the Math course typically focuses on problem solving which aligns with the flipped classroom style, while Economics courses involve more lecture and theoretical problems.
