2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This is a work-in-progress paper.
The flipped classroom (FC) model is a well established teaching strategy dating to 1970’s practices in the Soviet Union. FC has two decades of use in post-secondary education since it was proposed by Lage et al. However, breaking studies find no academic improvement with FC model among minority students. Rather, it distances at-risk students. Indeed, certain demographics prefer authoritative over dialogic instruction style. We are motivated to determine FCs effectiveness with students at a medium-sized Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) and Minority Serving Institution (MSI).
For one of our NSF grant activities, we piloted two variations of the flipped classroom model. The key idea is that literature finds that FC classes need better regulation of underperforming students. Generally, the FC models in our work included peer-instruction, active learning, recorded lectures, and pre-assessment quizzes. There were no post-assessment assignments or traditional homework. Some sections employed Just-in-Time-Teaching, and careful selection of groups according to skill (within-class homogenous grouping). Other sections experimented with diversity and inclusion-based grouping and project-based learning.
Students at the university are non-traditional, a term used to describe individuals who meet some of the following criteria: having a significant gap between post-secondary education and high-school graduation, being financially independent from their parents, having dependents, and working twenty or more hours per week. 60% of the individuals at our campus are Pell eligible.
We study an intersectional inequality: wage-based work is disinclined to accommodate students attending lecture during the work day, and minorities may not prefer dialogic instruction. We analyze student attitudes since Fall 2020, among tens of class sections and hundreds of students. Class sections in the study are upper-division core courses in Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering. Data is collected from mostly online sections during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A pre- and post-surveys were administered collecting demographic information and student attitudes. Hispanic/Latino(a) students found videos to be a complete study medium—that it was not required to seek out third-party materials to prepare for class. They found the class to be more engaging, and self-identified that they could identify previous concepts important to the task at hand. Results were surprising because there were no statistically significant differences with a general population’s exposure to FC. Hispanic/Latino(a)s find the FC model described in our work engaging and effective.