Kriston Waugh
Department of English, City College of New York
ENGL 21007: Writing for Engineers
Flipping Laboratory Sessions in a Computer Science Course: An Experience Report
Professor Sara Jacobson
March 10, 2025
With the advancement of technology, traditional classrooms have become difficult to explain to new undergraduate computer science students attending college. Traditional classrooms focus too much on solely direct instruction and overwhelming their students with information. The flipped classroom (FC) model aims to rectify this issue by allowing undergrad computer science students to review the lesson plan and instructions for materials before class and allows everyone to have more class time for interactive, and student-driven activities.
The study conducted in the “Flipping Laboratory Sessions in a Computer Science Course: An Experience Report” article by Troya Javier, Parejo A. José, Segura Sergio, Gámez-Díaz Antonio, Márquez-Chamorro E. Alfonso, and del-Río-Ortega Adela (2020) shows that the authors provide an informative point of view while also using the rhetorical term of comparison and contrast. This is explained to the audience by informing us that it takes around half the class time for the professors to describe the software and hardware that would be used for the lab, this directly impacts the students time for practical lab time with sometimes students getting less than 20 minutes to finish a lab each class.
The main purpose of the introductory paragraph is for the authors to persuade you how FC would be better for students and professors because of the information that can be learned before class and how it would lead to more time for labs to be studied and completed. The authors aimed to prove this with a study spanning over 2 years that would involve 6 professors, and 434 undergrad computer science students split into two different sections of flipped classroom learning and traditional classroom learning. The authors would also include 3 research questions that would later be answered with in-depth research in the evaluation section.
The study was conducted in the compulsory course Software Architecture and Integration and was taught in the second year of the software engineering degree at the University of Seville, Spain. In 2017, the first-year group was composed of 225 students and six instructors, and the traditional method of teaching was followed. Instructors used PowerPoint to help explain the lab and students also took notes for around 33.2 minutes then the actual lab took place.
In 2018, the second-year group course was composed of 209 new undegraduate computer science students and the same six instructors from the previous year in 2017. This year the lab explanation was flipped to online videos to allow students more time for hands on assignments. Each instructor prepared videos with their face and voice in it to allow the students to have a sense of familiarity and allowing them to engage and understand the information being told to them. When the students arrived at class, they were quizzed using the website Kahoot based on their knowledge from the videos they had watched prior to class for around 10 minutes. After the Kahoot the remaining amount of time would be used towards hands on assignments.
During these two years the authors used the two groups to compare one another using the same variables but different environments. This showed the data recorders the strengths and disadvantages of flipped classrooms vs. Traditional classrooms. The traditional method met similar expectations to what data recorders expected but, the flipped classroom showed improvement based on efficiency, ease of understanding, and enjoyment. It also showed that both students and professors preferred the flipped classroom because it simplified the need to explain information.
In the data collected section the authors collected the data of both groups and their data from lecture duration, Kahoot quizzes, Student questionnaires, assessment grades, and a survey about the experience of a flipped classroom. The data collected were then compared to one another to see the opinions of the students on what they liked and disliked about the semester and the overall grades of both groups.
For the flipped classroom some of the research was done exclusively to their group for researchers to build an understanding of the flipped classroom and differentiate between the traditional classrooms. The Kahoot answers were recorded using a valid student’s identifier which helped the professor record and see their progress throughout the semester. According to the lab report around 1027 answers were collected with a valid identifier out of 1163. Toward the end of the semester before students got their grades back were required to complete a survey based on how the work was handled, and if it was better or different than a traditional classroom setting. The students were given the survey before they got their grades back so that students could have a clear judgment of the course and not affect the study negatively because of their grades.
In both groups at the end of each lab, the students were required to fill out a questionnaire based on what they thought and understood about the lab presented to them. The questionnaire was encoded on a numerical scale from 0-10. Even though both groups were involved in the same study the researchers added a question to the questionnaire exclusively for the flipped classroom students asking if the video quality was good and if the information in the videos was also good. The author’s main reason for including this section was to inform the reader about the statistics of each group what benefited one group and what didn’t benefit the other.
In the evaluation section, they explain the statistical techniques that the researchers used to record the progress and information collected from both groups of the study. The first use allowed the researchers to process the data and used the formulas Pearson’s product-moment correlation coefficient to assess linear relationships, and Spearman’s rho nonlinear correlation coefficient was used to assess monotonic relationships. The second process used was Cronbach’s alpha coefficient and it was used to ensure reliability in the responses to the survey about FC. The third process was encoded using an ordinal scale to tell the differences between surveys and questionaries. Finally, for the difference among both group’s grades, the Wilcoxon’s rank-sum test with continuity correction was applied and the Shapiro–Wilk tests were applied to evaluate normality. The data from the research collected will be displayed as answers to three research questions.
The first research question was directed to the audience of researchers on how students perform with either methodology or how attendance at lab sessions influences their performance. The researchers analyzed the evidence and used Wilcoxon’s test on both semester students and found that there was no significant difference in both semesters’ student’s grades. There was also a positive correlation between student attendance and grades in 2017 but, completely disappeared in 2018 from what I can assume has to do with the inclusion of video-based information. As a result of the videos, the students had around 24 extra minutes for practical assignments leading to an increase in how many students completed labs.
The second research question was also directed towards the audience of researchers on how is students’ attitude toward the course with either methodology? During the flipped classroom semester in 2018, around 42% of students preferred the lab sessions and thought it was easy to follow compared to the 31% labs of 2017. It was also recorded that students who engaged in pre-class materials significantly rose from 32% in 2017 to 83% in 2018. The survey response indicated that 86% of students watched the videos before class and 64% rewatched them through the semester upon the information that 55% of the students spent more time studying at home with the flipped classroom. The researchers think the positive change in percentages has to do with the information being translated into videos instead of PowerPoint slides.
The third research question was once again directed toward the audience of researchers and how do students assess the FC methodology? This section focuses on the research and data done with the flipped classroom group and the responses that were on their surveys. 85% of the students felt like they preferred the flipped classroom and 59% of the students felt more motivated to learn after the experiment. 61% of the students would recommend the flipped classroom to other students and 67% of the students believed that other courses should adopt the use of FC. 66% of the students found the Kahoot at the beginning of the class useful and 74% of students felt like they had more time to finish labs because of the outside of class information. 71% of students thought the videos used before class were appropriate and well informed.
To finish off the lab report the author uses the discussion section to talk about the final results of the study and the limitations that the students, professors, and researchers had during the study. One of the limitations of the study was the surveys were conducted in Spanish which could lead to some mistranslated information. At the beginning of the study, the student’s age and gender were not considered and weren’t recorded as valuable information. Surveys were also completed at the end of the lab, which was seen as a problem at the end because the students could rush through the questions. In my opinion, the author included these limitations to show the reader that there could be more research to be done to conduct better claims about the flipped classroom in the future.
