Bryn Mawr's Liz McCormack featured in HHMI Bulletin article on Flipped Classrooms

The Science Education article in the Spring 2014 issue of the HHMI bulletin interviews several faculty in biology, physics, and chemistry about their motivations for flipping the classroom, the strategies they used, and the results the have seen. Among them is Bryn Mawr College's Elizabeth McCormack, who discusses her her experiences flipping a sophomore electromagnetics class, including initial resistance from students and what she has learned from that resistance. (Click here for slides from McCormack's 2013 Blended Learning Conference presentation on this experience.)

Learning impacts described in the article seem consistent with those reported by faculty who discussed their own experiments with flipping the classroom at the 2014 Blended Learning Conference -- high-performing students continue to do well, and middle- to lower-performing students show improvement. One quasi-experimental study that compared students in a section of introductory physics course that introduced students to content through pre-class reading assignments to free up class time for active-learning activities to a section taught in a traditional format, found that the form scored significantly higher on a standard test of their knowledge of quantum mechanics.     

As that class and Prof. McCormack's illustrates, "flipping a class" does not necessarily require creating video lectures, although faculty who flip classes do often use instructional video to supplement textbooks or clarify points students find confusing. Rather, it is a pedagogical approach that shifts student's first exposure to content outside the classroom, in order to spend class time helping them processing that content. The approach long antedates the digital technologies that the "flipped classroom" is typically associated with, but those technologies have helped faculty adapt a teaching philosophy once reserved for advanced seminars to introductory and intermediate-level survey courses.