Keith Maycock

Flipping learning not just content: A 4‐year action research study investigating the appropriate level of flipped learning

This action research study follows a between‐subject design strategy and attempts to identify whether a departure from a direct instructional teaching strategy towards a flipped learning pedagogy results in increases in student performance over time. In particular, the study considers the effects of integrating flipped learning pedagogic instruction into a Year 1, second‐semester undergraduate Computer Architecture module. The first year of the study represented a baseline year in which a traditional direct instructional teaching method was used. The three subsequent years of study involved the inclusion of increased proportions of flipped learning instruction. When removing the baseline year from the study and focusing on the years that included a flipped proportion of instruction only, the analysis showed statistically significant increases in learner performance for mature students as the module migrated towards a fully flipped delivery model. Positive increases associated with continuous assessment components of the modules were also observed across the population as the module migrated towards a flipped learning model. However, this apparent increase in learner performance showed no impact on the terminal examination scores across years, indicating that improved performance in continuous assessments was probably due to shallow learning.

Chalk and talk versus flipped learning: A case study

The case study was carried out at a third‐level college in Ireland to investigate the performance of a student population completing a first year computer architecture module using a flipped learning approach against a traditional chalk and talk approach. The study was completed over a 2‐year period with the same lecturer delivering both approaches to two independent groups. The Kruskal–Wallis H test was performed to understand whether the terminal exam and continuous assessment performance, measured on a continuous scale from 0 to 100, differed based on pedagogy design. The dependent variable was selected as the assessment component, whereas the independent variable was the pedagogy design, with two distinct groups: flipped learning and chalk and talk. The study found that the chalk and talk cohort outperformed the flipped learning cohort in the terminal examination, which was statistically significant (p < 0.05), but observed a small effect size of 3.6% over the population. It was also found that the reverse was true for the continuous assessment instrument, whereby the flipped learning cohort outperformed the chalk and talk cohort. This difference was also found to be statistically significant (p < 0.0005) with a small effect size of 9.6%.

The Impact of an Automated Learning Component against a Traditional Lecturing Environment.

This experimental study investigates the effect on the examination performance of a cohort of first-year undergraduate learners undertaking a Unified Modelling Language (UML) course using an adaptive learning system against a control group of learners undertaking the same UML course through a traditional lecturing environment. The adaptive learning system uses two components for the creation of suitable content for individual learners: a content analyser that automatically generates metadata describing cognitive resources within instructional content and a selection model that utilizes a genetic algorithm to select and construct a course suited to the cognitive ability and pedagogic preference of an individual learner, defined by a digital profile. Using the Kruskal–Wallis H test, it was determined that there was a statistically significant difference between the control group of learners and the learners that participated in the UML course using the adaptive learning system following an examination once the UML course concluded, with p = 0.005, scoring on average 15.71% higher using the adaptive system. However, this observed statistically significant difference observed a small effect size of 20%.