Bridging conceptual understanding and practical skills through a smart platform supported flipped classroom in higher education

Abstract

Introduction – The gap between theory and application is always a problem for practical science courses. Plant taxonomy is a core course for science college in higher education. However, students frequently learn terms but cannot apply their theoretical understanding to real identification and justification tasks, so we assessed how effective such a smart learning platform based on the flipping classroom approach is at closing that theory practice gap. Methods – In our experiment, two consecutive cohorts of second-year undergraduates at Gansu Agricultural University in China were compared across two academic years. The experimental group was given flipped classroom instruction in 2025 and the control group was instructed by traditional teaching method in 2024. Final exam grades, process-based performance, student satisfaction, and long-term skill retention were measured. Results – The results showed that in terms of theory and practical performance assessment as well as processoriented learning criteria, the flipped group performed better: including cooperation, engagement time and class participation (p < 0.05). Also, students from the flipped group reported highly positive perceptions of the learning process. Furthermore, higher levels of retained basic content and practical skills as measured at the 6 months post course test. Discussion – Our results indicate that the impact of such a smart platform with support from a flipped classroom may produce stronger and more sustained effects on applied skills than on theoretical knowledge. It provides a useful approach to bridge the theory-practice gap of plant taxonomy and allied fields.