The Simultaneous Application of Flipped Classroom and Group Discussion to Improve the Quality of Learning the History of World Architecture Course: An Intervention Mixed Methods Design

Problem statement: 

the history of world architecture is full of little-used and unfamiliar words related to historic structures and buildings. The breadth of information and the complexity of the concepts of historical monuments, as well as the traditional lecture-based teaching methods, have made it difficult for students to analyze and organize the cognitive and metacognitive fields of the art and architecture of ancient civilizations in the history of world architecture classroom.

The present research aimed to explain group discussion in a flipped classroom can improve the quality of learning in the History of World Architecture Course.

This research was conducted using an intervention mixed methods, in which the constructivist grounded theory introduced by Kathy Charmaz was used in the qualitative part and the experimental method was used in the quantitative part. Qualitative data collected from the notes of the experimental group members, behavior observation, and interview with some of them were analyzed using the initial and focused coding method. Then, in the quantitative part, the amount and quality of learning in the experimental and control groups were compared using a quasi-experimental design. The subjects of the present research consisted of 43 students studying architecture at Shahid Rajaee Teacher Training University, who were placed in two classes with relatively equal conditions using the convenience sampling method, one as the experimental group including 22 people and the other as the control group including 21 people, forming two intact groups. The instrument used for collecting quantitative data was the researcher-made test, the content validity of which was confirmed using expert judgment, and its internal consistency was confirmed with Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of 0.82. Quantitative data was also analyzed using the Mann-Whitney U test and SPSS-22 software.

The findings of this research led to seven focused categories in the qualitative part. The categories of cognitive construction and collaborative knowledge construction for the difficulty of learning unfamiliar and underused words, the categories of visualization and graphic expression of textual content for the impossibility of visiting historical monuments abroad, and the categories of agency in learning educational content, linkages and networking between the contents of each chapter, promotion of effective communication skills, and resilience in learning abstract concepts for the breadth of information and the complexity of concepts were formulated. The findings of the quantitative section indicated that the simultaneous application of flipped classroom strategies and group discussion had a statistically significant effect on improving the quality of students’ learning in the history of world architecture course (p<0.01). Therefore, the calculated effect size is 0.399, which indicates a 40% effect of this teaching method on improving the quality of students’ learning. These results emphasize the importance of modern teaching methods in improving the quality of students’ learning, and further research in this field may provide a deeper understanding of their  effects.