Study Finds That Women Benefit More From “Flipped Classrooms” Than Men

A new study conducted by researchers at the University of Massachusetts and Yale University found that students in so-called “flipped classrooms” perform better on examinations than students in traditional college classrooms. And the study found that this effect is particularly true for women students.

In traditional classrooms, professors lecture and present material and then ask students to complete assignments using the material presented in class. In a flipped classroom, students are asked to familiarize themselves with course materials online before they come to class, materials that traditionally are presented in class lectures. Then, in the flipped classroom students and the professor work to solve problems together that in a traditional class structure students would be doing on their own as homework.

The results of the study found that students in flipped classrooms outperformed students in traditional classrooms by about 12 percent. And the research found that women benefited from the flipped classroom more than men.

Lead author David Gross, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Massachusetts, said that “women and low-grade-point-average students’ performance gets pushed up pretty significantly, but we feel most students get something more. It engages everyone more; we get more interaction.”

The study, “Increased Preclass Preparation Underlies Student Outcome Improvement in the Flipped Classroom,” has been published on the website of the journal CBE-Life Sciences Education, a free, online quarterly journal that is published by the American Society for Cell Biology. The study may be download by clicking here.