اثرات معکوس سازی اصول طبقات اقتصاد خرد: تاثیر برنامه ریزی Effects of flipping the principles of microeconomics class: Does scheduling matter?

1. Introduction As colleges and universities face mounting pressure to improve student learning and increase retention rates, instructors and professors find themselves constantly implementing new teaching techniques in an effort to increase active learning, engage students, and improve their retention of material. One of the more popular techniques being adopted is inverting or flipping the classroom. Flipping the classroom entails reversing the order in which activities of a course take place. That is, traditionally, students are first exposed to course material during class, often in a lecture format, and they work on problems and applications outside of the classroom. In a flipped classroom setting, students first receive the lecture material outside of the classroom, typically either through readings or videos, while during class time, they engage in active and hands-on learning (Bergman and Sams, 2012; Hughes, 2012). As flipping has gained popularity, research has attempted to quantify the benefits of flipping. A scoping review of early studies on flipping from a variety of disciplines found generally positive effects of flipping on student and faculty satisfaction and weak or indirect evidence of the effect on student learning outcomes. Furthermore, the effectiveness of flipping may depend on the methods used, pedagogy involved in the design of the flip, and details of the flip itself (O’Flaherty and Phillips, 2015). Until recently, most research documented gains in student learning outcomes in STEM disciplines (see, for example, Larson and Yamamoto, 2013; Moravec et al., 2010; Pierce and Fox, 2012). These studies did not include control variables and implemented simple difference in means t-testing, leaving them unable to assign causality to flipping. Researchers in economics have attempted to expand upon these to document how flipping affects student outcomes in principles classes. Calimeris and Sauer (2015) implement a treatment-control experiment and document that after a negative adjustment period, students in a fully flipped classroom score roughly 0.5–0.6 standard deviations, or two-thirds to an entire letter grade, higher on midterm and final exams. Similarly, Balaban et al. (2016) find that students in a flipped principles of microeconomics classroom in a large class in a university setting scored 0.2–0.7 standard deviations higher on a final exam than those in a traditionally taught class. They also find evidence of increased student effort during the semester, which may be a mechanism through with flipping is effective. This finding corresponds with Green’s (2014) finding that the effectiveness of active learning through an extensive, semester-long simulation is dependent upon students’ participation and effort.1 Caviglia-Harris (2016) documents that students in partially- or fullyflipped courses scored significantly higher on a final exam than did those in a traditional course. Olitsky and Cosgrove (2016) use a differences-in-differences approach and find that students in a flipped-blended learning environment learned significantly more over the course of a semester than those in a traditional course.