An Investigation of Student Web Activity in a “flipped” Introductory Physics Class

In the last few years, flipped teaching has become one of the most popular teaching trends being adopted. Yet, there is a lack of data on what students use and find useful while taking these classes. This paper focuses on the use of class web logs, student surveys and class records to analyze student use of the material developed as well as how this use correlates with course results. The course being investigated is taught once a year by the same professor. It is the second course in an introductory physics course sequence for life science majors. The flipped format was adopted gradually in the course starting the Spring 2009 semester. The analysis focuses on the last iteration. The current format of the course was partially driven by student input, and took several years to fully implement. In this case, lecture time is devoted to answer and discuss questions, work on practice problems, and, sometimes, to explore the topics students find interesting. Instead of lectures students complete online multimedia quizzes, embedding both short lecture type recording segments simulations and videos. The quiz format is meant to help students identify the topics they don’t understand. Homework is also completed online. It includes both traditional end of the chapter problems and simulation mediated questions. Students also complete pre-laboratory simulation mediated activities. The analysis focused on the analysis of each of the components the students complete online. That data was also correlated to the student performance in various class assignments.