Adjustments (Flipping Update #2)

So my microbiology had their first exam last Thursday. It wasn’t pretty. The class average was a 67. Ugh. There was one person who did awesome, and a few that did ok, but the majority of the class scored right around the average. I was really hoping for spectacular results after flipping the classroom. Instead this average is about 5pts below that of last semester’s average for the same exam. I’ve spent the last several days asking myself a lot of questions and reading through student comments posted on an informal class evaluation survey. It seems for the most part that my students felt like they studied hard. Clearly, they were not studying what I thought they should be. Here are a few adjustments that I will be making:

1) Restructuring my study guide. Right now my study guides consist of a series of bullet points framed as learning objectives. I am going to make the next one less open ended with more specific questions. I don’t want my students to sit down and memorize the study guide, but I feel it is important to give them clear guidelines as to what I expect. I will have to counter this with designing more questions on the exam that require critical thought instead of rote memorization.

2) More quizzes. I only gave one online quiz during my first unit. This was primarily because I could barely keep up with posting videos and prepping in-class activities. I think my students need the quizzes so they know where to focus their studies. In the past I have relied on MasteringMicrobiology to accomplish this task, but I abandoned it this term due to major errors in the material.

3) Provide clearly defined learning objectives for each in-class activity. One comment that I saw several times from my students was that they had a hard time connecting the in-class activities with the online lecture material. I am going to try to counter that by providing my students with learning objectives and worksheets for each in class activity that help to draw those connections.

As you can see, this whole flipping thing has created a lot more work for me. I think it will pay off in the end and the next semester that I do it will be much easier. For now I am going to trudge ahead and hope that these changes will make a difference on the next exam. I truly just want to be sure that my students are actually learning. I am trying to draw them out of the robot student mentality of information in, information out. I know my intentions are good. I just need to work on the execution.