Flipped Classroom: A Bridge to Success for Students with Disabilities?

Flipped Classroom: A Bridge to Success for Students with Disabilities?

            Technological advances in recent society have motivated individuals to hone their skills in the area of science, engineering, and technology. Science fuels the ability of the country to innovate, lead, and create jobs in the future (Next Generation Science Standards Leads States, 2013). However, there are gaps that need to be filled in relation to science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering (Rep.) (2017) reported that persons with disabilities along with women, and three racial and ethnic groups are underrepresented in Science and Engineering. The demands of the most recent K-12 law puts students with disabilities in a challenging predicament to be able to make significant progress in the general education curriculum. Individuals with disabilities need support or bridge towards success in the science field. This bridge could be the blended learning approach in education such as the flipped classroom model.

           This interactive session will look into flipped classroom as a blended learning model to address the rigorous concepts in a high school Biology I course. Flipped classroom provides direct instruction through the use of technology outside the class to allow the teacher to provide active learning activities during class and provide individualized attention to certain students (Bergman & Sams, 2015). In the flipped model, the teacher utilizes technology as a vehicle to provide individual student access to the content.

          During this 10-15 minute presentation, the presenters will spend the first few minutes to discuss the rationale, the design, the methodology, and the results of the pilot study conducted using a flipped classroom model in a high school biology class. The presenters will talk about the nature of flipped classroom and the role of technology in the flipped model. After the whole group presentation, attendees will experience the flipped classroom materials that the students accessed during the pilot study. The participants will be split into different groups and will do a gallery walk to interact with the different materials studied by the students to learn the concept of DNA during the flipped classroom pilot study. While interacting in the gallery, the participants will respond to a set of questions about the formats of the flipped classroom materials in the gallery. Pulled from NOVA, Hippocampus and teacher- made vocabulary prezi, the materials in the gallery include: 1. Picture Vocabulary Prezi on “DNA- related Terminologies” – Teacher- made front- loading material 2. Real Life Video titled “What has DNA?” from STEMbite Collection 3. Digital Text on “The Discovery of DNA” and “DNA Structure and Function” from NROC Collection (These materials are chunked and organized using the principles of cognitive- load theory, can be converted to a word document to allow text-to-speech format, and does allow annotation.) 4. Conceptual Chunked Videos on “Building Blocks of DNA,” “Paired DNA,” and “The Chemical Structures of DNA” from Bio interactive Collection 5. Simulation / Hands-on Activity on “Modeling Transcription” from Concord Consortium Collection

            Upon completion of the gallery walk, a volunteer will be asked to perform a short experiment titled “Extract Your Own DNA.” After the short demonstration, the presentation will end with a discussion on the answer to the gallery walk guide questions.