Flipped classroom vs. lecture class : their effects on motivation, classroom engagement and task performance in a writing class

The flipped classroom (FC) has recently gained attention of educators and researchers as an approach to teaching and learning in the 21st century. However, the growing research on the FC approach has found inconsistent results in terms of its effect on academic achievement and performance among students. The present study suggests that this may be because previous researchers failed to include motivational factors to explain the effect of the FC on students’ outcome motivation, engagement and performance. Following the nonequivalent between-group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design, the present study compared two flipped classrooms (FC1 and FC2) with one lecture class (LC) to find out if there were differences in motivation, classroom engagement and task performance among grade 7 students in an English writing class. There were a total of 108 participants with 12.58 mean age. Fifty-two were males and 56 were females. The lesson, worksheets and activities implemented were similarly taught in both FC and LC, but they differed in the instructional structure in and outside the classroom. FC students were asked to: watch the teacher’s lecture at home through lesson videos answer video worksheets and discuss in class the content of the video and do the writing tasks. The LC students, on the other hand, listened to the lecture and answered the accompanying worksheets in class. Writing tasks were mostly assigned as homework in LC. Before the experiment, participants were given a pretest to measure motivation, classroom engagement, task performance, perceived need support, and task value and an essay prompt. The same tests were given in the posttest along with an evaluation of students’ experience in FC and LC. T-test analyses were initially done to measure change in motivation, classroom engagement and task performance across time among the three classes. Rank transformation analyses of covariance (Conover & Iman, 1982) using hierarchical regression (Seltman, 2015) were then use