Research On The Design Of Learning Activities To Improve Students’ Understanding In The Flipped Classroom

Lack of creativity and critical-thinking ability has become major learning difficulties faced by China’s college students. However, the ever-changing society puts forward higher requirements on them and calls for in-depth learning. In this case, the flipped classroom(FC) has attracted extensive attention of education researchers and practitioners. In the FC model, the key to success is to find an approach to promote students’ in-depth understanding and truly embodies the learner-centered idea. Therefore, in order to guide the teaching practice of FC learning, it has important theoretical and practical value to explore theories on designing FC learning activities.Based on the Backward Design principle,this article is intended to develop a framework for the design of learning activities that foster students understanding in flipped classroom in order to get out of the dilemma of formalization. This study aims to address the following three questions: what’s the connotation of “the flipped classroom focused on Understanding”? What are its main component factors? What kind of flipped classroom learning activity can promote students ’deep understanding’?Firstly, the study identifies the meaning of the flipped classroom focused on Understanding. Then, five main factors has been induced through literature analysis and content analysis: generative topics playing the core role in a curriculum, comprehensible learning goals leading to specific performance, heuristic learning task, environmental resources supporting the FC and continuous assessment throughout the learning process.Firstly, the study identifies the meaning of the flipped classroom focused on Understanding. Then, five main factors has been induced through literature analysis and content analysis: generative topics playing the core role in a curriculum, comprehensible learning goals leading to specific performance, heuristic learning task, environmental resources supporting the FC and continuous assessment throughout the learning process. And a model started from “learning background analysis” is constructed based on those five elements, teachers should accomplish the six steps in order.Secondly, based on the research paradigm of design-based research, the researcher and the teacher carry out a series of teaching practices to inspect how the FC learning activities in accordance with the framework affect the level of students’ understanding capacity. Meanwhile, with continuous reflection and summary, researcher has improved the process and design strategy of learning activities, and ultimately build a relatively complete theoretical system for the FC emphasizing understanding. When designing FC learning activities, the generative topics should be worth deep discussion, and the learning objectives should follow design principles of clear, specific and open. Meanwhile, the learning tasks should be ill-structured, and the environmental resources must support the learning tasks. Moreover, students’ understanding level is an important index of the evaluation criteria.The study collects a series of data that contains pre-class tests, pre-class doubts, classroom observations, learning reflection, students’ work, interviews, surveys. The results showed that: learning activities designed according to this model can significantly improve students’ understanding capacity and help accelerate the growth of their diversified abilities. What is more, students show a strong tendency to be fond of this new learning style. The activity flow diagram can help teachers sort out the presentation order of the learning activities and learning stages they belong to. When implementing the FC focused on understanding, instructional designer need to meet the following strategies: 1, all learning activities should be student-centered and students’ individual learning needs should be respected; 2, teachers need to inspire students’ thinking and develop learning initiative and creativity; 3, a flexible flip learning environment is important to carry out interactive lessons; 4, create opportunity for students to share their real understanding and encourage them to make presentation in different ways; 5, define an elaborate evaluation system to continuously assess student’s understanding.In further studies, with the purpose to deeply push forward our research, we need to focus more on teaching practices in different disciplines and fields. In addition, we will move forward to design a more specific learning assessment system and clarify its corresponding evaluation index.