This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.

In October 2016, Texas Lutheran University was awarded a three-year grant (award #1611979) from the National Science Foundation to develop, implement, and evaluate the effectiveness of Inverted and Active-Learning Pedagogies (IALP) for student success.  The project has three main goals: 1) developing IALP classes to optimize content coverage and maximize higher-order student learning, 2) determining the impact of IALP on the success of STEM majors and 3) conveying the results of the study and the course material to the national STEM community to assist faculty to enhance their teaching by  incorporating IALP techniques into their courses. Furthermore, by sharing the research design and measurement tools we will allow investigators to replicate and further test the efficacy of IALP courses. We utilized several tools to measure the impact of the IALP technique: pre- and post-test instruments, student scores on assignments, quizzes, exams, projects throughout the semester, an end-of-the semester faculty questionnaire, and student surveys. Eight Faculty from biology, chemistry, physics, and statistics participated in this project.  To examine the effectiveness of these techniques across disciplines, specific courses were identified where one section remained in a traditional lecture format, and one was “flipped”, i.e., content was pushed outside the class to create time for interactive problem solving in the classroom. We have archived the most relevant videos covering IALP classes at the following web site:  www.tlumathcsis.org  .Our data was gathered from 649 students (301 in inverted classrooms and 348 from traditional classes) in 30 sections of introductory courses in biology, chemistry, physics, and statistics.  Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy was used to identify the cognitive dimensions (remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create) and knowledge dimensions (factual, conceptual, procedural) to be included in pre- and post-assessment in all courses tied to this project. Overall, our study did not show any advantage in implementing IALP strategies compared to traditional lecture-based instruction. In fact, traditional classes demonstrated some relatively minor benefits in some areas. Specifically, there was some evidence that Pell Eligibility was associated with poorer performance in inverted/hybrid Classes compared to traditional classes. However, students in inverted/hybrid classes were less likely to withdraw from their classes, specifically in biology and chemistry. To disseminate the results of this research, PIs and other faculty participants presented their results in over a dozen national conferences such as MathFest, and Joint meeting of AMS, MAA(JMM) . A paper based on a portion of our results, gathered from 374 students in introductory statistics class, will soon appear in the PRIMUS journal.

Last Modified: 07/29/2020
Modified by: Reza O Abbasian