AALHE 2018 Annual Conference

Many first year students enter college lacking the problem solving ability required for success in higher education. The flipped classroom environment allows students to work collaboratively on challenging quantitative and conceptual problems with help and scaffolding from peers and instructors. Developing problem solving skills early on in college can lead to future success in subsequent college science classes and ultimately in students' future careers. The paper describes the assessment of flipping an introductory physics classroom by analyzing several types of data, in order to get multiple perspectives, both before and after the course was flipped. Instructors, assessment specialists, department chairs, and administrators will benefit from individually discussing the challenges and lessons learned about both the process of flipping an introductory course and evaluating the impact of that process. Student grades in the course, GPA in subsequent courses, retention, student evaluation data, and instructors' experiences teaching the course are analyzed and shared. Results indicate that students performed better in the flipped version of the course and the associated lab course. Students also performed better in subsequent quantitative reasoning courses after the course was flipped with female students making the largest increases. However, flipping the course also resulted in lower student evaluations.