Monday 7 March 2022

Research-based instructional strategies and flipped classrooms in economics

I'm still searching for the 'killer research' that convinces me that flipping the classroom will do good overall. Or even better, a convincing or growing consensus in the research literature. Unfortunately, I have so far found neither of those things. The latest bit of my search took me to two articles published in the 2018 issue of the AEA Papers and Proceedings, on using research-based instructional strategies (RBIS). In short, RBIS involves applying strategies from cognitive science that have been shown to improve learning gains for students. That sounds very promising.

The first article was this one (ungated earlier version here) by Austin Boyle and William Goffe (both Penn State University). They applied RBIS to two sections of macroeconomics principles in 2015. Their RBIS approach involved flipping the classroom, along with pre-class assignments (allowing for just-in-time teaching), clicker questions and worksheets, regular quizzes, quiz reflections, and homework (to achieve spaced repetition). Using the Test of Understanding of College Economics (TUCE), and comparing the learning gains of their class (of around 500 students) to those in the TUCE norming sample, Boyle and Goffe find that:

The mean pre-TUCE score was 11.90 questions correct (out of 30), and the mean post-TUCE score was 19.91. The mean learning gain, g = (post − pre)/(30 − pre) , was 0.44. In the TUCE norming population, the mean pre-TUCE score was 9.80 questions correct and the mean post-TUCE score was 14.19, for a gain of 0.22. Thus, students in this study had twice the gain of the norming population.

That all sounds very promising, but there are a couple of problems here. First, there is no true control group. The comparison with the norming sample is interesting, but not definitive. Second, there is no randomisation and so there could be selection into the class. Students who would do worse may disproportionately drop out of the class, and there doesn't appear to have been any adjustment made for that.

The second paper is this one (sorry I don't see an ungated version) by Sarah Cosgrove and Neal Olitsky (both University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth). They applied RBIS to an economic principles class, and importantly they have a control class (that uses traditional teaching methods). Unfortunately, other than flipping the classroom, the article doesn't give much specific detail about what the RBIS strategies that were employed actually were. Unlike Boyle and Goffe, we do find out that a little more than 10 percent of students (in both treatment and control groups) dropped the class, and there were similar proportions that dropped out of both groups (that doesn't mean that there is no selection bias, though, if for example better students dropped out of the control group, while worse students dropped out of the treatment group). Cosgrove and Olitsky find that:

...the average effect of treatment is an additional 3.2 questions or additional relative learning gains of approximately 15 percent. The potential outcome means results indicate that students in the treatment group answered 11.6 more questions correctly or 62.6 percent, on average, on the final exam than they did on the pretest; whereas the control group improved by 8.4 questions or 47.7 percent, on average.

However, this research also has problems. There was no randomisation of students between treatment and control groups, and there are large differences between the two groups. The treatment group had many more White students (64 percent, compared with 37 percent in the control group), more US citizens (98 percent, compared with 78 percent), and fewer low income students (11 percent, compared with 29 percent). Even if you control for those variables in the analysis (as Cosgrove and Olitsky did), it is hard to believe that they don't contribute significantly to the observed differences in performance.

I'd like to know more about these RBIS strategies, but unfortunately the format of AEA Papers and Proceedings precludes a long exposition of the teaching methods. However, given that we can't have strong confidence in the results (in both cases because the treatment and control groups were too different), I think I'll wait until I see some higher quality research on this.

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