Turning the Classroom Upside Down: Experimenting with the Flipped Classroom in American Government

ABSTRACT

With the concept of the flipped classroom taking the teaching world by storm, research into its effectiveness, particularly in higher education, has been lacking. This research aims to rectify this by detailing the results of an experiment comparing student success in American Federal Government in a flipped classroom, a traditional, lecture-based classroom, and an online class. The findings suggest that the flipped methodology improves student perceptions about and attitudes regarding the class, both of which can be important in stimulating student learning. While all groups demonstrated a significant increase in performance over the semester, student grades were higher in both the traditional and flipped classes as compared to the online section.

KEYWORDS:

• American government
• flipped classroom
• teaching political science

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Edris Montalvo and the reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

I utilize the ANOVA test of significance throughout this article. When variables are shown to be significant, I then display the Tukey posttest values to determine which groups are statistically different for those significant variables only.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wendy N. Whitman Cobb

Wendy N. Whitman Cobb received her Ph.D. from the University of Florida in 2012. Her areas of interest include American institutions and space policy. She is the author of Unbroken Government: Success and the Illusion of Failure in Policymaking. Dr. Whitman Cobb is an assistant professor of political science at Cameron University in Lawton, Oklahoma.