Effects of Flipped Classroom in the Reduction of Learners’ Errors in Differential Calculus

The focus of the study is to investigate the effects of the flipped classroom in the learners' errors in Differential Calculus tasks. Two groups of students in the Technological Institute of the Philippines in Quezon City, Philippines were under investigation. The control group went through the traditional classroom method while the experimental group went through the flipped classroom strategy. Comparability of the two groups was ensured at the start of the semester through a test involving general mathematics topics. The students in each of the two groups were further divided into two—STEM and non-STEM which performed the same set of activities in their respective groups. In the experimental group, lectures took place outside of the classroom with the aid of pre-recorded videos. The videos were personally created by the author. The average running time of the videos is 20 minutes. In cases that the topic needed more than the allotted time, the lecture was divided into segments. Classroom hours were used for more effective and creative activities and the teacher focused more on observing, guiding, and helping the students. A pretest consisting of Differential Calculus concepts was administered at the start of the semester. Learners' errors per topic, by type of error, and by the group were determined through the pretest. Errors were classified into four namely: comprehension, transformation, procedural, and encoding. Posttests were given at the end of the preliminary, midterm, and final periods. Posttest questions were similar to those in the pretest. Common errors of the students were noted and analyzed like the previous analysis. The effectiveness of the flipped classroom in reducing the errors of the students was tested by comparing the errors of the students between the pretest and posttests of the two groups and the two tracks per topic. The number of correct answers and unanswered items was also recorded and included in the analysis. In the end, the flipped classroom was found effective in the reduction of comprehension errors in functions, differentiation, and applications. In functions and the applications, the non-STEM track had a significantly greater difference in the frequencies of such errors, while in differentiation the two tracks both have remarkable contributions about the reduction. The grouping of the students only showed a significant effect in the reduction of such errors in functions and in the applications which meant that the students in the traditional classroom group performed almost at the same level as the students in the flipped classroom group in differentiation. The flipped classroom group also showed a significantly fewer transformation error in limits and continuity in the posttest which meant that the grouping of the students only mattered when it comes to learning the said topics.