Flipped Classrooms May Exacerbate Student Achievement Gaps. Here's How

Education Week reports:

Flipped classrooms have become a popular way for teachers to find more time for activities and individual support during the regular school day, but a new study cautions that the model could trade short-term gains for wider achievement gaps.

The model "flips" the traditional rhythm of class time by introducing teacher lectures online so that students can view them at home, while using class time for projects and group activities that might traditionally be consigned to homework. An Annenburg working paper released this week found mixed, mostly short-term benefits from using the flipped-classroom approach.

Elizabeth Setren, an assistant economics professor at Tufts University, and math and economics colleagues at the United States Military Academy at West Point randomly assigned more than 1,300 West Point cadets to one of two different versions of their required introductory math and economics courses. In the flipped version, students were assigned a video lecture before each class and engaged in interactive problem-solving during the class. In the standard version, teachers gave a standardized lecture during class that covered the same material as the video, and assigned as homework the problems that the flipped-class students had worked on in class.

The researchers found no differences in economics classes. In math classes, students in the flipped classes scored on average a third of a standard deviation better than those in the traditional classes on the unit quiz—but by the end-of-course test, both groups performed equally well.

"We can't say for sure why we see effects for math and not economics, but perhaps the key part of this story is how motivated the individual instructors are," Setren said.

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