The flipped lecture is by now a well known and appreciated way to optimize the time spent in the classroom and increase student engagement, often achieving improved learning outcomes. A newly published study, set in undergraduate biochemistry and biology, explores the possibility of applying the same principles on laboratory classes — with encouraging results. The pre-laboratory activities have enhanced the students’ level of engagement with the course material, and failure rates have decreased.
To design a laboratory exercise is at least as challenging as designing a lecture; the connection between theory and practice is easily lost and students often enter the lab more or less unprepared, forcing laboratory staff to spend a lot of time on practical instructions before the students actually get to engage with the equipment. In Australia, a group of lecturers in biochemistry and biology set out to tackle these challenges by implementing flipped classroom principles in two second-year science courses.
Their ”flipped laboratory” design includes sets of online activities of the remember-and-understand type, for the students to complete before arriving in the lab. (In class, focus is shifted towards higher-level skills like application and analysis, and opportunities for feedback and communication between students and teachers opened up — in alignment with the flipped classroom idea.) Examples mentioned in the paper are instructions on lab security and definitions of discipline-specific concepts, videos about techniques to be applied in the coming experiment (publicly available or produced by the course teachers), multiple-choice quizzes, and so on. Students are awarded bonus points by completing some online tasks.
The pedagogical study seeks to investigate whether the chosen pre-laboratory activities could have an effect on student engagement, performance and failure rates, and course grades are combined with survey results over several years to interpret the outcomes of the trial. In total, 231 students answered the survey (2015-2017), and of those approximately 85% agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that the pre-lab tasks helped them prepare for the practical sessions, and 79% agreed or strongly agreed that they enhanced their engagement with the course material. As a positive side effect, a majority of the respondents thought the online exercises contributed with a stronger link between theory and practice. These changes are, according to the authors, also clearly noticeable by the lab assistants, who feel the students now seem more prepared when coming to class. In terms of failure rates, there have — with one single exception — been significant reductions in both courses since the flipped lab was introduced in 2011. Also, students who participate in the online activities were more likely to perform above the average, compared to a control group.
Comment: It is probably hard to find examples of undergraduate laboratory classes that students are not told to prepare for in some way. What this study shows, however, is that there are gains associated with designing these preparatory tasks with more care than is usually (?) done. Short video instructions, for example, are typically very popular among students and may provide a good picture of the actual lab equipment that can make unexperienced students feel more comfortable. An even more hands-on option is of course to let students familiarize with the lab equipment in real life before class, for example at home. In a recently launched student project by PhD student Emma Andersson at Fysikum, students get to borrow ”shoebox experiment kits” to take home for practice. You can probably think of similar activities that could enhance your students’ preparedness for laboratory work within your subject?
Text: Emma Wikberg, Physics
