Effects of Course Structure on Student Engagement and Learning Performance in an Electronics Course

Wei-Ying Cheng; Jennifer Wen-Shya Lee; Shi-Wei Chu

doi:10.20308/ejpe.v14i1.344

Wei-Ying Cheng National Taiwan University
Jennifer Wen-Shya Lee
Shi-Wei Chu

DOI: https://doi.org/10.20308/ejpe.v14i1.344

Abstract

Many educational strategies have been proposed to improve students’ learning motivation and outcomes. This paper reports the student learning outcome results of a three-year study centered on the Electronics course at the Department of Physics of National Taiwan University. In the first year, peer instruction (PI) with in-class lectures was implemented. In the second year, in-class lectures were replaced with online lectures in a flipped classroom (FC) approach, and PI in class was maintained. In the third year, PI-based conceptual questions (CQs) were scored as part of in-class homework to enhance motivation for online lecture preview. Learning performance was evaluated based on cumulative percentage of correct answers to CQs and summative assessment. The results revealed improved student performance on summative assessment with PI and FC approaches combined. Furthermore, when CQs were scored, overall learning outcomes were significantly enhanced. In addition, an advantage of using a PI plus FC approach over using PI alone is that more course materials can be covered in online videos, which prevents a loss of lecture content to the time-consuming, in-class discussions involved in PI. Our study indicates that when students’ motivations to prepare before class are reinforced using graded CQs, the learning outcome enhancement of PI plus FC is even more significant.

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