Enabling and Integrating Online Formative Assessment in a Flipped Calculus Course

Abstract

The increased use of videos in mathematics courses means that direct instruction, traditionally part of class lectures, now often occurs outside of the classroom. Although students come to class with some baseline level of understanding, instructors lose opportunities to assess students’ understanding of content as it is seen for the first time. This action-based research study embedded formative assessments into videos used in an inverted Calculus I course. In this article, we describe how a web-based media player, Transformative Anchored Collaboration Environment (TrACE), was integrated into the course and how feedback on students’ understanding of the videos’ content was used to alter instruction.

Keywords:

• Formative assessment
• Calculus
• technology
• flipped pedagogy

Notes

¹ Student survey data uses a different convention for identifying participants than the data obtained from TrACE. There is no participant identifier that creates a link between the two data sets.

Additional information

Funding

This work is funded in part by grants from the National Science Foundation under DUE # 1245059 and IIS #1318345. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.

Notes on contributors

Larissa Bucchi Schroeder

Larissa Bucchi Schroeder is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Hartford. She received her M.S. from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill and her Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on teaching and learning of calculus.

Brian Dorn

Brian Dorn is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and the Union Pacific Community Chair of Computer Science Education at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He earned his Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Interactive Computing, and his research centers around the design, development, and evaluation of educational technology and computational learning environments.