Lack of literature on flipped lecture rooms

Compiling literature on flipped/inverted classrooms for higher education isn’t easy. A lot of returns are of the “I couldn’t believe my ears!” type blog, which is fine for what it is, but not an academic study. Yet more literature, typically of the Chronicle or Educause type, tends to say flipped classrooms are great, and they lead on to MOOCs (as in the case of this recent C&EN piece), with a subsequent discussion on MOOCs, or tie in flipped classrooms with Peer Instruction, with a discussion on peer instruction. In these cases, and especially so for PI, this is the intention of the writer, so it is not a criticism. But it makes it hard to say what value flipped lectures have in their own right.

I want to think well of flipped lectures, and have piloted some myself, the concept being an extension of pre-lecture activities work that I have spent a lot of time on. While looking for methodologies to rob for a future study of my own, I had a look in the literature. The study most people seem to refer to is an article published in 2000 in the Journal of Economics Education which described the implementation of the inverted lecture. The paper is a nice one in that it describes the implementation well, with the views of students and instructors represented. But there is not much after surveying students in terms of considering effectiveness. I come from the school of thought that says if you throw oranges at students in a lecture and survey them, they will say it helped their learning, so I’m surprised that this study is referred to by evangelists in the flipped lecture area. The course site is still available, and while it looks a little dated, it does seem to align nicely with what the Ed Techs would consider good instructional design (resources, support, social area, etc).

A more recent study is that in Physics Reviews Special Topics: Physics Education Research. While it appears this is more of the pre-lecture type of activity rather than flipped lecture (ie there is still some lectures involved), the lecture room seems quite active. This study found that students who completed the pre-lecture work did better in exams than those that didn’t.

Not much else in my initial trawl. I’ll keep looking, as of course people might have done this and not called it flipped or inverting the lecture. Of course part of this is that education research takes time, and perhaps in the next few years, we will see lots of flipped lecture room literature.