Education reform has long been centered on changing traditional lecture to more active learning strategies. It can however, be difficult for faculty in content-heavy courses like chemistry (and other science gateway courses) to both deliver content and include active learning practices. One approach that allows time for both is the flipped classroom, where students acquire basic content knowledge at home before coming to class. They then build on that knowledge during class by engaging in more active learning strategies that have proven to lead to better student comprehension and better retention of material.<br/>There are numerous examples of successful flipped courses at the college level, but most of the chemistry courses studied are from small classrooms and/or elite college environments. In this paper we describe our approach to flipping the General Chemistry sequence for both small and large classrooms at 2 different colleges within a large public university system and report on its success as compared to traditional instruction and other active learning classrooms.<br/>Our flipped course was housed on a custom designed website and linked to a commercial online homework system. A series of voice-over, animated, PowerPoint videos were created and class time was devoted entirely to small-group collaborative problem solving and a modified form of peer instruction. When comparing the flipped model to traditional lecture we see increased student performance for all classroom sizes (from 20 to 1000 students) at both colleges and for students who, upon entering college, are potentially less well prepared. In addition, we will report the results from our current random-controlled trail comparing the flipped model to other active learning environments.

Structure and evaluation of a flipped general chemistry course as a model for both small and large gateway science course at an urban public institution

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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