New Perspectives in Science Education

One of the main challenges that professors have to face when teaching science is to find teaching strategies able to increase the interest of the students toward scientific contents. Poor cognitive and affective performance are among the main consequences that this lack of interest produces in the students. Following students’ centered methodologies have been proved to be an effective strategy to increase students' interest to science, and improve both the results of the cognitive and affective components of learning. In order to follow this teaching methodology, more in-class time is required to perform hands-on activities and to let students apply the theoretical scientific contents delivered in the course. To achieve that, this research explores the application of a flipped-classroom methodology to a science course. In the flipped-classroom methodology, the traditional roles are inverted: the time students spend in their houses is used to work the theoretical contents by means of video-lectures delivered by the instructor, while classroom time is used to complete the students’ centered and other collaborative activities to put in practice the scientific contents delivered. This classroom setting aims to engage students more successfully with the course. In order to gauge this relatively new methodology, a comparative study was conducted. Precisely, a traditional classroom was compared with a flipped-classroom setting for the same science course. The study was conducted at the Teaching Training College of the University of Extremadura (Spain). The comparison was carried out in terms of how the instruction methodology had a significant influence in the students’ affective dimensions toward the course and the learning outcomes achieved. According to the results, the students had a general positive perception to a flipped classroom setting, showing more positive attitudes toward the course. Besides, the students’ emotions analysis revealed that they were more positive and less negative in the flipped classroom compared with the traditional one. Therefore, regarding the course learning outcomes, statistically higher average grades were achieved in the flipped-classroom course, as well as the number of students passing the course.

Keywords: Science education, training science teachers, learning outcomes, teaching methodology, inverted classroom;