P2-15: What We Learned about the Design of a Flipped Classroom in an Introductory Statistics College Course

Information

In recent years the statistics education community has extensively promoted changes to the teaching and learning of statistics in schools and universities (Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences [CBMS], 2016; GAISE College Report ASA Revision Committee, 2016). Research has called for active learning environments where students are provided with the tools they need to build a strong statistical understanding, thereby promoting and provoking their statistical thinking. Our introductory statistics courses are generally taught in a lecture format, where a professor/instructor lectures a group of students, and students are passive learners. In order to promote active learning, we incorporated active learning strategies into the statistics courses at our institution, with approximately 120 students participating.

To achieve this goal, we designed a partial Flipped Classroom (FC) where only five of the topics from the course were taught in the FC format. This partial FC consisted in the use of video lectures outside the classroom, and in-classroom hands-on activities. The hands-on activities were designed to provoke students’ conceptual understanding of the statistical concepts being studied, engaging them in the learning process through in-class active participation of discussions guided by the professor. By flipping the classroom we were able to use in-class time to engage students in problem-solving activities and whole-class discussions. All the materials that were used for this partial FC were designed by the research team members guided by the GAISE College Report (2016), focused on the educational learning objectives of the topic being taught, and helping our students achieve higher cognitive levels of statistical understanding using the Bloom Taxonomy (Roehl et al., 2013). Gundlach et al. (2015) follow a similar flipped approach where students watched video lectures outside of class and worked on hands-on activities during class. Winquist and Carlson (2014) took a different approach where they had “students read relatively simple chapters and answered reading quiz questions prior to class and completed workbook activities in class” (p. 1).

For our poster presentation we will start by offering an overview of the study to the attendees. This will include details of the re-design of the course, as well as results from our pilot study. We will also share some of our hands-on activities so the attendees can understand what the students were asked to complete during class. Attendees will also be presented with an overview of the new materials the research team is developing. These include video lectures that are animated, dynamic, and non-linear.