Methodology

Definitions of key terms

Flipped learning – is often defined as students preparing using instructional material before class and applying the material during class. However, to ensure equity, pupils in S3 Business Management will be given the instructional material and the time and space in class to work through this individually. Teacher direction to re-cap key concepts and practical application of material will follow afterwards.
Retention – the ability to recall names, features, advantages and disadvantages of topics within the course.
Core concepts – are each of the sub topics in the 6 parts of the National 5 Business Management course (Understanding Business 1 & 2, Management of Marketing, Management of Operations, Management of People and Management of Finance). As an example a core concept in Understanding Business 1 would be types of business organisations.

Focus

The subject area for the enquiry is Business Management and the class group is S3 who have started studying for their National 5 qualification over 2 years.
The intervention planned is to use a flipped classroom experience for certain sub-topics of the course over a period of 6 weeks. The sub-topics covered by flipped classroom and sub-topics which were taught using a traditional classroom approach will be tested by means of retrieval practice activities and the scores from the activities will be used to indicate whether pupils better retain the flipped-classroom knowledge or the traditional classroom knowledge.

Data Collection

Scores for at least four retrieval practice activities will be taken from the class. By taking scores from four different activities this means the 8 week process can be split up fortnightly.
During the initial 2 weeks of the enquiry, the flipped classroom style will be introduced in order to allow the pupils an opportunity to try out the process and become used to the increased independence of learning themselves before teacher led activities. Data from retrieval practice activities in the first fortnight will be collected but will not be included in the data analysis as the concept is new to the pupils which could incur lower scores and could negatively skew results.
In weeks 3 & 4 of the enquiry pupils will cover some knowledge traditionally and some using flipped classroom, both types of knowledge will be tested in a retrieval practice activity at the end of week 4. This will allow comparisons to be made for how much knowledge pupils retain from each type of classroom experience.
This process will be repeated again over weeks 5 & 6 and weeks 7 & 8 which will provide 3 sets of retrieval practice activity data. Repeating the process over 3 x 2 week blocks means that pupils may become more familiar with flipped classroom learning over time, it will mean results could be averaged out or account for discrepancies in any sub-topics of the course which may be deemed “easier” or “harder” than others and should enable a holistic evaluation of the impact of flipped classroom.

Practitioner Enquiry