Transforming a Flipped STEM Course Through Adaptive Learning

University Of South Florida, Tampa FL

Investigators

Abstract

One of the National Academy of Engineering's 21st Century Grand Challenges is "Advancing Personalized Learning" and this project helps to contribute to this knowledge base. Active learning in the classroom has been proven to be an effective approach to improve student learning and engagement, as well as readiness for the STEM workforce. An example of active learning, which will be part of this project, is the flipped classroom model where the sequence of content delivery and practice of problem solving is flipped. Students are initially introduced to the lecture content prior to and outside of class, and participate in collaborative activities under the facilitation of an instructor during the classroom. To add to the flipped classroom model and to further enhance student learning, this project introduces a freely-available adaptive platform to personalize the pre-class activities for every learner. It is expected that this personalized pre-class experience will further enrich student collaboration and learning in the classroom. This project involves both development of the platform and assessment of student learning to investigate the efficacy of the method. This body of work will advance our understanding on the impact of the combined flipped and adaptive approaches on cognitive and affective learning gains of students from diverse populations. Many engineering problems result in mathematical models that do not have exact solutions or otherwise would take a long time to solve. To solve such problems, many engineering students and also mathematics students, take a course called Numerical Methods in order to learn computational techniques to solve complex mathematical models. The context of this project is a Numerical Methods course that will be redesigned as an active learning classroom incorporating adaptive (personalized) learning. More specifically, this project will compare the effectiveness of three instructional approaches (a flipped class with adaptive learning, a flipped class without adaptive learning, and a blended class without adaptive learning) on students' conceptual gains, procedural knowledge gains, higher-order problem solving, and affective learning. Both qualitative and quantitative metrics will be used during this investigation. Project deliverables include instructional materials and best practices for teaching Numerical Methods in a flipped setting on an adaptive platform. Dissemination avenues include the freely-available Knewton adaptive platform, an open education resource portal, and social media.