Flipping the classroom to address cognitive obstacles

Abstract

Engineering students have difficulty transitioning to post-calculus courses, in part, because how calculus is expected to be known at the end of calculus differs from how it is expected to be used in later courses like differential equations1. Our objective was to identify cognitive obstacles for engineering students as they transition from calculus to differential equations and to adapt the differential equations course to address them. The purpose of this paper is to describe a way of exploiting the flipped classroom and the theory of cognitive obstacles in order to increase coherence in the mathematics classroom. The instructional design, data collection, and analysis all centered around the question: Do students' perceptions of the flipped classroom reflect coherence in the course?. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2014.