Flipping the Classroom and Student Performance in Advanced Statistics: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment

Abstract

I administer a quasi-experiment using undergraduate political science majors in statistics classes to evaluate whether “flipping the classroom” (the treatment) alters students’ applied problem-solving performance and satisfaction relative to students in a traditional classroom environment (the control). I also assess whether general student characteristics such as when and where students took the prerequisite course, grade point average (GPA), and gender influence performance. I find flipping the classroom gives students statistically significant advantages in difficult, applied areas emphasized in class. Furthermore, students in the flipped classroom feel they learned more and enjoyed the course more than those in a traditional classroom. I argue students’ affective preference for a flipped classroom is important for student motivation, recollection, and future use of quantitative data analysis. Flipping the classroom entails high start-up costs, but it can merit implementing to improve both effective and affective instructional outcomes.

Keywords:

• active learning
• flipping the classroom
• quasi-experiment
• statistics education

Acknowledgements

I would like the thank Boise State University’s Center for Teaching and Learning for providing extensive support for this research. In particular, I would like to thank the Director of the Center, Dr. Susan Shadle, along with other participants in the Boise State Early Career Teaching Scholars Program. Drs. Yong Gao, Matt Genuchi, Jill Heney, and Casey Keck provided valuable insight and suggestions throughout the research process. Finally, I am grateful to the Political Science Department at Boise State University for affording me the opportunity to experiment in the classroom and supporting scholarship on teaching and learning.

Supplemental Data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15512169.2014.985105

Notes

Boise State University is a public, metropolitan research university in the United States with approximately 23,000 students. Many of our students are first-generation college attendees and many (45%) are of nontraditional age.

The instructions for the final research paper are available online in the supplemental data file.

I used Philip Pollock, III’s The Essentials of Political Analysis (2011) along with his An SPSS Companion to Political Analysis (2011) in both courses.

Boise State University’s Institutional Review Board approved this study (Protocol # 025-SB13-010).

The project description and grading rubric are available in the Technical Appendix (see supplementary files online).