Efficacy of a Flipped-Classroom on Learning and Confidence of Engineering Students

Abstract

A flipped classroom is a type of blended learning (BL) that students learn the materials at their own time and by attending at a physical classroom. This method helps learners to learn the materials at their own time and reinforce their learnings in a classroom. This study interrogates efficacy of a flipped-classroom in comparison with traditional teaching method on students learning and confidence in a geotechnical engineering unit at Curtin University, Perth Western Australia. To do so, an experimental investigation was performed on students enrolled in a semester-long geotechnical unit and they have options of flipped model or a conventional model classroom for their learning. To score students’ performance against learning and confidence, a Likert scale was employed to rate students level of confidence by introducing a 20-items knowledge assessment on five topics before and after each learning. The results showed that students attended in a flipped-classroom gained higher scores in comparison with the students attended in conventional teaching course. For confidence rating, the traditional course students ranked a lower confidence than the flipped group for all assessed modules.