اثر طبقه معکوس در دوره اصول اقتصاد خرد: شواهدی از یک شبه آزمایش با طرح های معکوس دو طبقه ای The impact of the flipped classroom in a principles of microeconomics course: evidence from a quasi-experiment with two flipped classroom designs

1. Introduction In economics teaching, traditional lecturing still takes up the largest share of class time, an estimated 60% (Goffe and Kauper, 2014) to 83% (Watts and Schaur, 2011). This central role of lecturing is under increasing scrutiny as empirical evidence suggests that active learning techniques are more effective than lecturing in promoting learning (see e.g. Freeman et al., 2014). A pedagogical approach that decreases lecturing, thus freeing class time for active learning, is the inverted classroom (Lage et al., 2000) or the classroom flip (Baker, 2000), whereby first exposure to the material is moved outside the classroom usually in the form of lecture videos (Abeysekera and Dawson, 2015). The classroom flip appears to improve learning outcomes as reported in three major reviews of the existing literature (Bishop and Verleger, 2013, Giannakos et al., 2014, O’Flaherty and Phillips, 2015, O’Flaherty et al., 2015) even though reviewers express some concern for the lack of a “robust scientific approach” in evaluating these learning outcomes (O’Flaherty and Phillips, 2015, 89). Recent studies using more robust methods, seem to confirm the existence of improvement in learning outcomes from flipping the classroom, albeit moderate (Anderson and Brennan, 2015, Calimeris and Sauer, 2015). Moving beyond the analysis of how flipping the classroom affects learning outcomes overall, some researchers have begun to investigate more fine-grained questions. Ryan and Reid (2016) asked how flipping the classroom affects the outcomes of weaker students. They found a 56% reduction in Ds and Fs grades and in the withdrawal rate when flipping the classroom even though no improvements in learning emerged at the aggregate level. Touchton (2015) focused on what type of learning flipping affects the most. He found a larger improvement in learning outcomes in the sections which students generally find most challenging even though at the aggregate level the improvements were very small. Olitsky and Cosgrove (2016) examined whether gains in learning outcomes become larger as students adapted to the flip and showed that this was the case: the gains in learning increased as the flipped course progressed and students became better acquainted with the approach. Jensen et al. (2015) raised the question of how much the impact of the flipped classroom on learning outcomes depends on the choice of the control against which the learning outcomes of the flip are evaluated. They found insignificant learning benefits of the flipped classroom compared with a non-flipped, active learning course