From reflective thinking to learning engagement awareness: A reflective thinking promoting approach to improve students' dance performance, self-efficacy and task load in flipped learning

In traditional dance teaching, teachers' demonstration generally takes up most of the in-class time, which reduces the opportunities for students to practice. Therefore, researchers have started to adopt flipped learning to increase the in-class time for students' practice and teachers' guidance. However, there are some problems associated with the conventional approach to flipped learning; these problems include students' lack of preparation before class which affects their engagement in the in-class activity; lack of guidance when self-learning; no instant assistance when encountering problems; and lack of reflection. To address these problems, the current study proposes a reflective thinking promoting approach to instruct the students to understand the pre-class materials and to strengthen their reflection and the interflow among peers in flipped learning. A total of 129 university students were recruited in the present study. They were divided into the experimental group which adopted the annotation, reflection, questioning and interflow (ARQI) approach and the control group which adopted the previous flipped learning approach. The results revealed that ARQI could significantly enhance the students' dance performance. The interview also revealed that ARQI promoted the students' reflection. Moreover, the higher self-efficacy students tended to gain more benefits from the flipped learning approach than those with lower self-efficacy. Lastly, following the ARQI steps to finish the pre-class learning, students were aware that they were required to put more mental and temporal efforts into the class.