Analyzing the Effects of a Flipped Classroom Pedagogy on Freshmen and Sophomore STEM Courses

This Research-to-Practice paper, a work-in-progress, describes work supported by the First in the World program at three different universities in California. A consortium of three California State Universities (CSUs)- San Jose´ State University, California State University- Los Angeles, and Cal Poly Pomona - have a four-year grant from the U.S Department of Education First-in-the-World (FITW) program. Surveys of students revealed that a major challenge to success is course bottlenecks - impasses where they cannot enroll in a course they need to make progress toward their degrees or when they cannot successfully complete a course and move forward. All three campuses have large numbers of high-need and underrepresented students (URM) and URM students are overrepresented among students who receive low grades in bottleneck courses. To address course bottlenecks, the flipped classroom approach has been implemented in seven gateway STEM courses collaboratively across the partner campuses. This paper targets faculty and administrators interested in promoting and implementing the flipped classroom pedagogy at their institutions. It provides a brief overview of the target courses and the impact of the curricular changes thus far. In addition, a description of the in-depth Calculus study of the flipped classroom approach across the three campuses is discussed.