As a reversal to traditional learning, the flipped classroom is a new educational environment which is quickly gaining in popularity among educators around the world. In a flipped classroom, students learn the course lectures and content from online videos, materials, and other learning tools before coming to class, and spend a bulk of their classroom time asking questions and being engaged in interactive discussions.
The main purpose of this presentation is to present the results of a case study that was carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of a flipped classroom compared to a traditional classroom learning environment. The study was carried out from April 2014 to December 2014 at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan, and targeted 60 first-year undergraduate students. The experiment group was exposed to flipped lessons for 24 weeks using the English textbook ‘Lecture Ready I.’ The students were required to watch the course video lectures and online English learning materials using mobile technologies before coming to each class, and then created PPT slides for classroom presentations and discussions. The students shared their presentations and interacted with each other during the regular classes. A control group of students was taught using traditional methods with the same textbook ‘Lecture Ready I,’ but with no flipped lesson contents. The control students also watched the video lectures and answered the textbook questions, but only during regular classroom periods, including discussions among themselves during the 24-week period.
An assessment of pre-treatment and post-treatment TOEIC scores showed that the students exposed to the flipped lessons improved from 474 (SD 111) to 649 (SD 96), which was greater than that of the control group students, who improved from 484 (SD 123) to 617 (SD 115). By the end of the eight-month training period, the experimental group students had completed 80% of the course contents and substantially improved their overall reading, listening and oral communication skills through the online English lectures with flipped lessons.
