British Journal of Educational Technology doi:10.1111/bjet.12823

Vol 50 No 5 2019 2288–2307

© 2019 British Educational Research Association

A reflective thinking-promoting approach to enhancing graduate students' flipped learning engagement, participation behaviors, reflective thinking and project learning outcomes

Mei-Rong Alice Chen, Gwo-Jen Hwang and Yu-Ying Chang

Mei-Rong Alice Chen is a PhD candidate at the Graduate Institute of Digital Learning and Education, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include flipped learning and digital game-based learning. Gwo-Jen Hwang is a chair professor at the Graduate Institute of Digital Learning and Education, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. His research interests include mobile learning, digital game-based learning, flipped classroom and AI in education. Yu-Ying Chang is an assistant professor at the Department of English, Tamkang University, Taiwan. Her research interests include EFL learning, flipped learning, and digital learning. Address for correspondence: Gwo-Jen Hwang, Graduate Institute of Digital Learning and Education, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, 43, Sec.4, Keelung Rd., Taipei, 106, Taiwan. Email: [email protected]

Introduction Flipped learning is an evolutionary educational approach that combines lecture-based and in- teractive teaching methods (Johnson & Renner, 2012; Strayer, 2012). It reverses the instruc- tional focus of teachers, helping students to foster lower level thinking skills (ie, remembering and understanding) at home and developing their higher order thinking skills (ie, analyzing, evaluating and creating) in the classroom (Anderson, Krathwohl, & Bloom, 2001; Bergmann & Sams, 2012). In recent years, millions of videos of online educational resources from subject experts on a wide range of topics have been made freely available online. This ever-increasing

Abstract Although flipped learning has been recognized as being a potential approach enabling students to learn at their own pace before the class and facilitating in-depth peer- to-peer and student-to-teacher interactions in the class, it remains a challenge to promote students’ active learning in the before-class stage, which could significantly affect their in-class engagement and learning performance. In this study, a reflective thinking-promoting approach is proposed to facilitate students’ learning design project performance, technology-enhanced active engagement, and their reflective thinking and participation in the before-class stage of flipped learning. A quasi-experiment was conducted on a flipped Digital Learning course of a Master’s program in a university to evaluate the effects of the approach on students’ learning design performance, engagement, reflective thinking and participation. A total of 19 students (7 male and 12 female) were in the experimental group learning with the reflective thinking- promoting approach, while 19 (4 male and 15 female) were in the control group learning with the conventional flipped learning approach. The results indicated that the proposed approach significantly enhanced not only the students’ learning design project outcomes and reflective thinking, but also their engagement and participation in the before-class stage of flipped learning.

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access to lecture capture technology has made flipped learning much easier. Flipped learning is no longer a buzzword in education but a tendency and even a must (Bishop & Verleger, 2013; Hoffman, 2014; Lage, Platt, & Treglia, 2000). Many agree that it enhances learning practice and makes full use of the class time, focusing on student-centered interactive activities and individ- ual scaffolding (Bergmann & Sams, 2012; Tam, 2000).

Among various educational objectives, reflective thinking skills involve complex judgmental skills such as critical thinking and problem solving (Burton, 2010). These are indispensable skills in today’s world of technologies and information abundance. Therefore, it is believed that flipped learning must be able to help students attain these skills in all classrooms, at all education levels and in all subjects. To acquire reflective thinking in flipped learning, students need to fully par- ticipate and be engaged in designed pre-class and in-class activities and experience the process of remembering, understanding, analysis, synthesis, evaluation and finally conceptual change. This process is recognized as the development of reflective thinking (Atkins & Murphy, 1993;

Practitioner Notes

What is already known about this topic

• Flipping learning is an effective teaching approach that shifts the lecture time to the before-class stage and hence teachers have more time to conduct learning activities to promote students’ higher order thinking as well as to deal with individual students learning problems.

• Students’ learning experience, motivation and belief could be the factors that guide students towards engagement and participation in content and help them learn new skills.

• Engaging students in reflective thinking is an important and challenging issue. It provides students with an opportunity to scrutinize their own learning and hence make progress.

What this paper adds

• A reflective thinking-promoting approach into flipped learning is proposed to facil- itate students’ flipped learning engagement and participation behaviors as well as their project performance and reflective thinking.

• In addition to promoting students’ learning outcomes, the results indicated that the proposed approach provides promising results on the technology-enhanced active learning experience and participation in online learning in the before-class stage of flipped learning.

Implications for practice and/or policy

• Via monitoring students’ online before-class progress, instructors can recognize the factors that affect students’ learning, adjust or differentiate their instruction and even provide students with more opportunities or with additional support to meet students’ needs for learning.

• The link between the video lectures and the classroom activities can be examined in future research to perceive the influence of video lectures on students’ participation behaviors in-class activities.

• Forming reflective thinking skill is important, but attainable; it needs students’ en- gagement and participation in time and effort.

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Hong & Choi, 2015), a natural form of learning from experience and reflection. Moreover, it is an active, persistent and careful consideration (Porntaweekul, Raksasataya, & Nethanomsak, 2016). If students can be aware of and govern their learning by actively participating in reflective thinking, that is, if they can assess what they know, what they need to know and how they bridge that gap in learning contexts, learning will occur. Therefore, in this study, we aimed to examine the effect of a reflective thinking-promoting approach on students’ learning design performance and reflective thinking compared with conventional flipped learning. Meanwhile, students’ tech- nology-enhanced active engagement and participation in the learning management system (hereafter LMS) were scrutinized. Further, we hoped to build up a systematic module, leading to more replicable and sustained flipped classrooms. Four research questions are addressed:

1. Does the reflective thinking-promoting approach enhance students’ learning design performance?

2. Does the reflective thinking-promoting approach strengthen students’ engagement? 3. Does the reflective thinking-promoting approach boost the students’ reflective thinking? 4. How does the reflective thinking-promoting approach boost the students’ participation in the

before-class stage of flipped learning?

Literature review Flipped learning The flipped classroom refers to the teaching mode which reverses the traditional instruction by delivering teachers’ lectures at the pre-class stage in the form of instructional videos or other media to enable teachers to have more time in the class to help students do exercises and solve the learning problems they encounter (Bergmann & Sams, 2012). In addition, the Flipped Learning Network (https ://flipp edlea rning.org/) has stated the importance of conducting effec- tive “flipped learning” by taking four components (ie, flexible environment, learning culture, intentional content and professional educator) into account. Researchers have further indicated the need to employ effective learning strategies in flipped classrooms rather than only paying at- tention to the development of pre-class instructional videos to draw on learners’ active learning and engagement (Bishop & Verleger, 2013). Jensen, Kummer, and Godoy (2015) defined that ac- tive learning is using additional technology, teaching materials and peer instruction for mean- ingful learning experience. Instead of teaching, the focus should be on how to involve students in autonomous learning, that is “the involvement of students in activities and thinking about activ- ities.” In addition, Hung’s study (2015) indicated that active learning involves students in doing activities and in thinking about the information, they are learning. In her study, the experimen- tal group participants had also invested more out-of-class study time in demonstrating their learning engagement. Many educators and teachers have supported this revolution (Bergmann & Sams, 2012; Butt, 2014; Hamdan, McKnight, McKnight, & Artfstrom, 2013; Hwang, Lai, & Wang, 2015), whereas some have raised doubts about its effects (Hung, 2017; Johnson & Renner, 2012; Strayer, 2012), and some consider it time-consuming and tedious to prepare video record- ings and in-class activities. Nevertheless, it is believed that two major aspects can make flipped learning effective and practical: one is in-class activities that can trigger students’ engagement and the other is top-quality educational videos of an optimal duration that suits students’ atten- tion span.

The premise of flipping a class is the combination of digitally based lectures as pre-class tasks and learner-centered activities in reserved class time (Hoffman, 2014; Tam, 2000). Because of its blended features, the flipped classroom approach involves digital platforms, that is, learning

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management systems, also known as LMSs (eg, Moodle and 1know) and real face-to-face human interaction (Bishop & Verleger, 2013). In the traditional teacher-centered learning theories, learners watch the instructional videos or read the assigned materials via the LMS out of class without any limitation of time and space; in contrast, in class, aside from assessing learners’ retention and understanding of the subject matter, teachers, based on learners’ diversity and on their knowledge and experiences, implement a learner-centered learning approach to have inter- active classroom activities (Soliman, 2016).

However, flipping a class does not really contribute to flipped learning. Flipped learning requires certain kinds of action (Hamdan et al., 2013; Hwang, Lai, & Wang, 2015). The Flipped Learning Network presented an effective flipped learning model with four components: flexible environ- ment, learning culture, intentional content and professional educator (Hung, 2017). There are still some implications worth restating. First of all, the learning environment has to remain flexible enough to create individual work areas, small group work spaces, and whole class mingling and demonstration stations (Bergmann & Sams, 2012). Next, a wide variety of learning experiences, approaches and academic-support strategies shift from the teacher-centered to learner-centered orientation, focusing on one-to-one differentiated instruction and immediate feedback in a com- fortable learning culture (Bergmann & Sams, 2012). A scaffolding effect on cognitive and social development occurs at any moment (Hamdan et al., 2013). Moreover, the video content is not simply “add-on” homework; it helps learners to build up a solid foundation for in-class activities and to develop their conceptual understanding and procedural fluency (Seaboyer, 2013).

Over the past decade, numerous studies have shown a sequence of positive results, including learn- ers’ academic performance (Bergmann & Sams, 2012; Sergis, Sampson, & Pelliccione, 2018), per- ceptions of engagement and learning skills (Elmaadaway, 2018), satisfaction (Bergmann & Sams, 2012), self-regulation (Lai & Hwang, 2016; Sun, Wu, & Lee, 2017), preferences (Bates & Galloway, 2012), technology acceptance (Kissi, Nat, & Armah, 2018) and so on. Nevertheless, the core value of flipped learning, that is, higher-order thinking skills, is less discussed and less satisfac- torily resolved. Flipped learning, not just revolving around lecture-based learning to attain lower thinking skills, that is, understanding and memorization, also encourages learners to develop higher order thinking skills in class: to apply, synthesize and even create knowledge (Seaboyer, 2013). Therefore, a sound, comprehensive flipped learning module will be outlined in this paper.

Technology-enhanced active engagement and participation Learning effectiveness is determined by students’ optimal engagement, and this engage- ment is achieved by factors that promote learning (Chuang, Weng, & Chen, 2018; Shernoff, Csikszentmihalyi, Schneider, & Shernoff, 2003). Students’ optimal engagement is their self-awareness of and their commitment to their own learning (Andrusyszyn & Yankou, 2004). Chen and Wu (2012), for instance, indicated that in learners’ experience, motivation and be- lief are the factors that guide learners towards engagement in content and help them learn new skills. The former is derived from the motive for learners’ actions, willingness and goals, whereas the latter is a firmly held opinion related to their learning strategies, academic perfor- mance and motivation (Chen & Pajares, 2010). In fact, two personal traits, namely motivation and belief, were examined and were found to be influential in learning in a flipped classroom context (Chuang et al., 2018). On the other hand, researchers (Ainley & Ainley, 2011; Shernoff & Csikszentmihalyi, 2009), have particularly pointed out that learning engagement is char- acterized by crucial factors such as learners’ concentration, interest and enjoyment. That is, in a powerful learning engagement, learners will be at a high energy level to engage in their learning and ultimately they have positive outcomes or results (Fink, 2003). However, with the

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rapid development and popularization of Web 2.0 and computer technology, these digital native students are faced with an unprecedented impact on their learning experience. According to Thompson (2013) and Fong and Wang (2007), digital natives’ learning motivation drops very fast when they are involved in reading. Their attention and interest reduces even more in ac- ademic subjects (Koutropoulos, 2011; Prensky, 2001). Therefore, technology-enhanced active learning has become particularly important.

The concept of active learning refers to students’ active engagement and participation in the learning process (Peng, Wang, & Sampson, 2017). It seizes the idea of learning by doing and eventually leads students to knowledge construction and continuous learning (Argote & Miron- Spektor, 2011; Pahl & Kenny, 2008). Technology is an effective tool that can facilitate the learn- ing process and consecutively create an active environment for learners to build their knowledge, skills, experience and engagement. For this reason, a reflective analysis of existing technology-en- hanced active learning engagement becomes crucial in this present study.

Learning engagement determines whether learners have learned throughout the course, but it is an individual attribute and needs to be examined (Felder & Brent, 2005; Ventura & Moscoloni, 2015). Based on the theory of Flow, proposed by Csikszentmihalyi (1990), Schwarzenberg, Navon, Nussbaum, Pérez-Sanagustín, and Caballero (2018) set up a more thorough, compre- hensive assessment model to measure learning experience. In this model, the constructs of learn- ing experience were adopted from Shernoff, Csikszentmihalyi, Schneider, and Shernoff ’s (2003) engagement, which consists of feedback, challenge, peer instruction, choice and enjoyment. In the construct of feedback, three dimensions are focused on: (1) the objectives and success, (2) self-current performance and (3) task completeness. Challenge, slightly beyond one’s current level of ability, has a discernible effect on academic performance. Peer instruction provides learn- ers with an opportunity to interact and learn from each other; it has a positive impact on learn- ing achievement. The perceived choice is related to one’s satisfaction and autonomous learning. Enjoyment refers to the satisfaction with the expected outcomes of the task.

In this study, we utilized Schwarzenberg and his colleagues’ (2018) experience model as a refer- ence to investigate learners’ engagement because it combines theories that describe the factors motivating learners and the conditions needed to generate the optimum engagement. With the help of the LMSs that monitor learners’ participation in the before-class stage of flipped learning, it is believed that technology-enhanced active engagement most likely represents a learner’s con- ceptions of how, when and where flipped learning does and can take place.

Reflective thinking Reflective thinking (also known as RT) is rational thinking realized by mental discipline (Kok, 2002). It is often used synonymously with critical thinking, but unlike critical thinking which includes various thinking skills leading to satisfying outcomes, RT puts more emphasis on the process of making decisions or stating opinions about what has happened (Evans, 2010; Schön, 2017). RT provides learners with a structured opportunity to scrutinize their own learning (Verpoorten, Westera, & Specht, 2011). During a reflective activity, learners can develop reflec- tive thinking skills by (1) relating new knowledge to previous understandings, (2) thinking in abstract and conceptual ways, (3) applying specific strategies in new tasks and (4) understand- ing their own ideas and thoughts (Hwang, Wu, & Ke, 2011).

RT can help learners to employ thinking skills such as analysis, synthesis and evaluation to reach a conceptual change (Atkins & Murphy, 1993; Hong & Choi, 2015). It is especially a critical factor in problem solving (Kok, 2002; Wang, Yuan, Kirschner, Kushniruk, & Peng, 2018). Although previous studies pointed out that RT is often associated with post-practice methods of experience

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recapture through self-assessment, such as portfolios or learning diaries (Evans, 2010) or inter- active activities (Hwang et al., 2011), whether flipping learning activates RT skills and engages learners in active reflection needs to be further explored.

Many researchers privilege RT and believe it can promote reflection upon practice (Atkins & Murphy, 1993; Evans, 2010; Hong & Choi, 2015; Hwang et al., 2011; Kok, 2002), but not many of them can actually measure RT and tell whether people are meeting their goal of developing RT and further give explanations (Kember et al., 2000). Fortunately, Kember and his colleagues offered a prominent, detailed questionnaire for assessing different levels of reflective thinking. The questionnaire consists of four constructs, namely habitual action, understanding, reflection and critical reflection. Habitual action refers to learners’ automatic performance with little con- scious thought, whereas understanding means that learners can understand and comprehend a concept in academic learning. As for reflection, based on Dewey’s definition (1933, p. 9), learners engage in intellectual and affective activities, raise questions, test the assumptions during the process of problem solving, and finally gain new understandings and appreciations. The last is a critical reflection, part of a higher order of thinking. It is a reasoning process which finally reaches a perspective transformation. Having the identities of scales, the next step is to draw up the effect of a reflective thinking-promoting approach in flipped learning.

Reflective thinking-promoting approach for flipped learning The “reflective thinking-promoting approach” proposed in this study emphasizes the guided “reflection” in a project after engaging students in the learning process of watch-annotate, sum- marize-question, discuss-give feedback and reflect-project by referring to Rath’s (2014) WSQ (Watch-Summary-Question) framework and Bloom’s Taxonomy Matrix (Anderson et al., 2001) to serve as the theoretical framework of the flipped learning activities. The proposed approach is divided into watch-annotate and summarize-question in the pre-class stage, discuss-give feed- back in the in-class stage, and reflect-project in the after-class stage, with six cognitive process dimensions (remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate and create) and four knowledge di- mensions (factual, conceptual procedural, knowledge and metacognitive) of Bloom’s Taxonomy Matrix (Anderson et al., 2001), as shown in Figure 1. This is intended to enhance learners’ reflec- tive thinking with a positive learning experience.

Pardo et al. (2015) stated that video annotation could be a beneficial strategy to help learners achieve their learning outcomes. In conventional flipped learning, video watching as a pre-class activity is a less interactive and one-way form of learning (Lai & Hwang, 2016). Fu and Hwang (2018) stated that the adoption of technologies could promote learners’ learning engagement, reflection and reflective thinking. Because of more recent advanced technologies, considering the “1know” system (http://www.1know.net) as an LMS example as mentioned earlier, it can offer time-stamped annotation features, whereby learners can watch course videos and take notes. Meanwhile, learners can also pause, rewind, re-watch the videos. In addition, a reflective thinking-promoting approach was adopted not only to watch-annotate but also to summarize question as a series of tasks before class, and then the learners discussed the question selected by the instructor and then provided feedback in class. The purpose is to help the learners engage in reflective thinking based on Bloom’s Taxonomy Matrix. Accordingly, they were given a chance to develop reflective thinking skills (see Figure 2).

To evaluate the effect of incorporating the reflective thinking-promoting approach into flipped learning on learner’ learning performance, technology-enhanced active engagement, reflec- tive thinking and participation in the before-class stage of flipped learning, the reflective think- ing-promoting approach was implemented in an online learning management system (LMS), the

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1know system, to monitor learners’ progress, as shown in the color-coded task list in Figure 2. The colors help to keep learners alert and more interested in their own learning progress as well as their peers’, encouraging them to learn.

One of the most substantial advantages of using the LMS is that it can monitor learners’ learning progress on pre-class tasks, note taking and behavior (time spent on each task), but it can also gather data on students’ online learning behavior. It can also offer time-stamped annotation fea- tures whereby students can watch course videos and take notes. In addition, it allows students to propose questions (as shown in Figure 3).

Figure 1: Structure of a reflective thinking-promoting approach for flipped learning [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

Figure 2: Illustrative example of the flipped learning management system [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

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Experimental design To evaluate the effectiveness of the innovative flipped learning approach, an experiment was conducted on a digital learning course to evaluate the learning design performance, learner en- gagement, reflective thinking and participation in the before-class stage of flipped learning with two different flipped learning approaches. The objectives of the Analysis and Applying Strategies of Digital Learning Literature course are to foster students’ literature reading and analyzing competences as well as their abilities of applying digital learning strategies to educational set- tings and analyzing the learning effectiveness.

Participants A quasi-experimental design with a digital survey was carried out in an Analysis and Applying Strategies of Digital Learning Literature course at a technology university in northern Taiwan. A total of 38 graduate students (11 male and 27 female) participated in this study, of whom 19 (7 male and 12 female) were in the experime

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