Perception and performance in a flipped Financial Mathematics classroom

Highlights

• Flipped classroom is a new design for the teaching and learning paradigm.

• Flipped classroom provides a student-centered approach to learning.

• Flipped class makes students more responsible for their own learning process.

• Flipped class success rate is higher than that obtained in the traditional class.

Abstract

The “flipped” classroom model is a new organizational design for the teaching and learning paradigm, as its name transmits, stands for the pedagogical switch of the traditional academic procedure as students' first contact with the subjects is made outside the “four-wall classroom bounds”. Teachers' role is transposed into a kind of guide and facilitator, indicating the way to go, avoiding to walk in a parallel path, or even ahead, but indicating the way to go, motivating students in their own knowledge construction, letting them lead the way, following and supporting, constantly and carefully monitoring their learning outcomes. Classroom time is consumed with open discussions, solving tasks and application problems, clarifying the supporting fundaments, in order to improve students' engagement into their learning process in a collaborative environment. A flipped model was implemented into a Financial Mathematics Course at ISCAP and the sample of our study consisted of 803 students, enrolled in 2014, 2015 and 2016. The main purpose of this paper is to investigate how the incorporation of the flipped classroom model into a Financial Mathematics class, affected students' class training, learning, and achievement. The results obtained with this approach have shown a positive impact on students' achievement overall.

Introduction

It is commonly accepted that the “Flipped Classroom Model” was born, in the year 2000, by the hands of (Bergmann & Sams, 2012). These two chemistry teachers, lecturing then at the Woodland Park High School in Colorado, had to deal with high absenteeism rates, which promoted failure and the drop of students' success in their classes. Trying to deal with this issue, they started to record their lessons and display them online, offering students an open access to classes, outside the classroom walls, anytime and anywhere. This has led them to question whether class time was, in fact, the best way to “transmit” all the basic and supporting information to students at all. In this sense, Bergmann and Sams became dedicated to prerecording their “live” lessons for review outside the classroom, leaving class time for more significant learning activities, promoting a more natural approach of more advanced and difficult concepts (Bergmann & Sams, 2014). In this way, the central idea is based upon the “inversion” of the traditional teaching paradigm, where the main phases of the teaching and learning process such as classroom activities and homework are reversed. The flipped classroom is then settled as a different course organization, where instructional content (e.g., pre-recorded video lectures, readings, online presentations, sample applications) is assigned as “homework”, to be analysed before coming to class, and in-class time is spent working on problems, advancing deeper concepts, and engaging in collaborative learning (Findlay-Thompson & Mombourquette, 2014). The flipped classroom may contain a large array of out-of-class activities, as mentioned, and in-class activities may also include a wide type of activities such as role-play, debates, quizzes, and group presentations, amongst many others (O'Flaherty & Phillips, 2015).

Confronted with this pedagogical teaching methodology, as theoretical/supporting materials must be provided as a “pre-class” tool for students to take and analyze individually, it is essential to examine what “kind” of materials promote students' engagement, as they must be responsible for class preparation. In this sense, with all these inherent changes, instructors have been forced to adapt fast to this reality, creating and developing an extensive variety of tools to grab student's attention and to motivate them to support the knowledge in their own learning process enthusiastically. One of the most engaging resources is the use of video lectures, since, through them, instructors can provide multifaceted information to students and, if used creatively, videos can become a powerful technological tool in the global and self-enrolment educational process (Soares, Lopes, & Vieira, 2015, pp. 435–440). One must note that video lectures are different from other teaching and learning technologies as allowing the benefit of using visual perception - “that powerful but neglected sense” (Moss, 1983) - in new ways. The image associated with movement can be vital to realize a specific process or understand how something works, moves, or performs, which is much more complex to transmit with static images or text.

This and several other materials, were developed from the scratch when implementing a Flipped Model into a Financial Mathematics Course, in the Bachelor Degree of Accounting and Management from the School of Accounting and Management (ISCAP), one of the eight schools of the Polytechnic of Porto (P. Porto), a Portuguese HEI with more than 20.000 students, teachers, and researchers, within the Porto metropolitan area. This flipped classroom model was used as a pedagogical teaching strategy to be tested for future purposes and kept its global traditional format in a control group. In this paper, we try to establish the eventual relations that such strategy takes with active learning practices and discuss its success, analysing how flipping may influence student's achievement and contribute to a better and fruitful engagement in this course.