Flipped and Non-Flipped Teaching Formats in a Political Science Class: Detecting Patterns of Students’ Soft Skills and Academic Achievement in an Experimental Single-Group Design

Abstract

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This article assesses the effectiveness of two active learning formats –a fully flipped and a semi-traditional one – for students’ soft skills, such as critical thinking, teamwork, self-efficacy, and learning perception, and for students’ achievement measured in terms of grades. To measure the impact on the soft skills, it uses a Wilcoxon test, with the goal of comparing the evolution of each soft skill in the flipped and semi-traditional formats. To measure the impact on grades, it uses a repeated measures ANOVA with the goal of detecting possible differences in terms of students’ achievement between the flipped and the semi-traditional format. The participants were 45 students enrolled in a Dual Degree in International Relations and Global Communication of a private Spanish university. Our study did not detect a clear tendency in favour of one format or the other in terms of students’ performance with either grades or soft skills. Far from considering this as an indication against implementing active teaching formats, we argue in favour of blending different types of traditional and active learning techniques, instead of prioritising one over the other.