Reflective Writing and Self-Regulated Learning in Multidisciplinary Flipped Classrooms

Flipped classes are designed to facilitate self-teaching, self-assessment, and self-regulation (Talbert, 2017). Because flipped classes demand more student responsibility than traditional classes, monitoring their own learning and making adjustments are crucial in helping students perceive this increase as manageable. The current study hypothesized that students in flipped classes would show increases across the semester in their self-regulated learning and that students who engaged in reflective writing tasks (e.g., Nilson, 2013) would show more improvement than those who did not. The full sample consisted of 402 students in courses across multiple disciplines, and there were 26 students in two psychology-specific courses. Contrary to expectations, students’ motivation and learning strategy scores decreased or remained stable across the semester, except for test anxiety and peer learning, which improved. In general, completing reflective writing tasks seemed to attenuate the decline in motivation scores and actually improve some learning strategy scores in the full sample, but not in the psychology-specific courses, except for test anxiety. These results may reflect an overall decrease in motivation due to the approaching end of the school year or more complexity than originally hypothesized. Follow-up analyses are underway to examine possible mediating/moderating factors. Methodological challenges in conducting multidisciplinary SoTL research and implications for future research are discussed.