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The enduring goals of higher education are to foster and cultivate critical reasoning in students and to nurture the capacity for continuing learning. The objective of supporting individuals to question, reason, discern, think more critically, and finally promote a disposition toward an unceasing pursuit of learning is not simply an ideal of higher education but also a requisite for our society to thrive (Abrami et al., 2008). The rapid evolution of information and communication technologies, and increased demands in health care have led to the examination and restructuring of curricula and pedagogies in nursing (Petit dit Dariel et al., 2013). The emergence of the Internet has provided new opportunities for educators to become creative and diverse. More sophisticated pedagogical approaches could be tailored to better suit specific course content, student demographics, teaching strengths, or environmental constraints (McCutcheon et al., 2015).
One widely adopted method is implementing the flipped classroom (FC) approach in which students independently learn outside the classroom the lower-level, rote, and foundational knowledge through prerecorded videos and assigned readings, whereas actual class time is used for higher-order, critical thinking activities, often with students in small groups, to scaffold or build on the basic concepts that students learned on their own (Persky & McLaughlin, 2017; Tucker, 2012). Although well-established in nursing education, current research is scarce and insufficient to confirm the effectiveness of an FC model (Bernard, 2015; Joseph et al., 2021). Using qualitative content analysis and concept mapping, the goal of this study was to determine observable differences between the two approaches. Specifically, this study examined whether an FC strategy enhances small group learning, and whether the evidence supports the differences between the FC and traditional learning (TL) format with respect to higher-order learning.
Literature Review
A literature review of studies exploring the use of FC versus TL delivery methods in nursing education revealed four major areas of interest: knowledge acquisition, satisfaction, disposition, and perception. For knowledge acquisition, five studies deemed the FC model and web-based learning to be similarly effective to TL approaches (Cameron, 2013; Gagnon et al., 2013; Geist et al., 2015; Harrington et al, 2015; Trobec & Starcic, 2015). Superiority of the...