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

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. 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 facilitate 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' engagement and participation in time and effort.