The Flipped Classroom Improved Medical Student Performance and Satisfaction in a Pre-clinical Physiology Course

Abstract

Recently, several articles have suggested that the flipped classroom could be an ideal model for pre-clinical medical education. The flipped classroom approach enables instructor-led time to be dedicated to integration and critical thinking exercises, while students learn foundational material outside of class via online videos or reading assignments. However, few studies have been published on the efficacy of this model for pre-clinical medial students. In this paper, we describe the implementation of a fully flipped classroom in a systems physiology course at The University of North Carolina School of Medicine. The organization of this flipped classroom aimed to keep contact hours and home-study hours equal to the hours previously used in the lecture-based course. With the implementation of the flipped classroom, both student performance on examination and student satisfaction with the course improved slightly compared to those of previous years where the curriculum was primarily delivered by lectures. This paper describes an example of a fully flipped course that demonstrated gains in performance and student course evaluations of a medical school pre-clinical course, and suggests that the flipped classroom could be a useful and successful educational approach in medical curricula.

Transforming a class from the Psychology degree into a <em>flipped classroom</em>

“…Since then, several studies in the field of health sciences have obtained positive results regarding the use of this methodology in the classroom (e.g. Domínguez et al, 2015;Gilboy et al, 2015;McLaughlin et al, 2014;Missildine et al, 2013;Morton & Colbert-Getz, 2016;Street et al, 2015). In the field of psychology, in particular, a study was conducted with first year undergraduate students in a Social Psychology course (based on traditional methodology) and in a Clinical Psychology course (based on the flipped classroom) consecutively.…”

How Do Medical Students Prepare for Flipped Classrooms?

“…Street et al argued that students have different learning preferences and that, therefore, various study materials should be provided to students [8]. However, our findings indicate that all students use the same basic materials to prepare for in-class activities and that half of the students used additional materials.…”

“…This provided information about the self-reported relative use of study materials, although it is not addressed specifically how much time students spend using the different materials. Future research might focus on this to investigate to what extent flipping the classroom does affect time commitment and to determine to what extent study load does increase when a larger variety of study materials is available as anticipated by Moffett, Prober, and Street [1,8,14]. This will provide insight into the relation between students perceived and experienced study load.…”

“…Some studies provide evidence showing improved performance for students learning in the flipped classroom compared to traditional (lecture based) classrooms [5,[8][9][10], and others indicate that students are more satisfied [11][12][13]. Conversely, increased time commitments and study load for students have been addressed [1,8,14].…”

“…However, students have access not only to web lectures but often also to textbooks (online) and/or e-learning modules to facilitate preclass preparation [1,5,6,14,20]. A variety of study materials has been considered to serve students personal learning preferences [6,8,21]. It is of interest to know whether providing web lectures as pre-class preparation would be sufficient for studentsinaflippedclassroomtoprepareforin-classactivities orthatadditionalmaterialsarerequired.…”