By Maddy Potts. Are you putting the final touches to a dissertation? Let's pass on some tips to those who'll be doing them next year. The sun is shining but many students won't see the daylight. Because it's that time of year again – dissertation time. More...

By Michael Feldstein. In my last post, I described positive but mixed results of an effort by MSU’s psychology department to flip and blend their classroom:

• On the 30-item comprehensive exam, students in the redesigned sections performed significantly better (84% improvement) compared to the traditional comparison group (54% improvement).
• Students in the redesigned course demonstrated significantly more improvement from pre to post on the 50-item comprehensive exam (62% improvement) compared to the traditional sections (37% improvement).
• Attendance improved substantially in the redesigned section. (Fall 2011 traditional mean percent attendance = 75% versus fall 2012 redesign mean percent attendance = 83%)
• They did not get a statistically significant improvement in the number of failures and withdrawals, which was one of the main goals of the redesign, although they note that “it does appear that the distribution of A’s, B’s, and C’s shifted such that in the redesign, there were more A’s and B’s and fewer C’s compared to the traditional course.”
• In terms of cost reduction, while they fell short of their 17.8% goal, they did achieve a 10% drop in the cost of the course….

It’s also worth noting that MSU expected to increase enrollment by 72 students annually but actually saw a decline of enrollment by 126 students, which impacted their ability to deliver decreased costs to the institution.

Those numbers were based on the NCAT report that was written up after the first semester of the redesigned course. More...