The Effect of Flipped Education on Undergraduate Student Critical Thinking Ability

Abstract

As much as we do not like to admit it, the world we live in is nothing like the world of 50 years ago. A visitor from 1940 would not recognize the place he had come from, in styles of dress, doing things, and architecture too. People have had to adapt their lives as technology advanced, and in the last 50 years, more technological advancements happened than in 300 years before that. In our world where everything is perpetually changing, each person must make dynamic changes to be an effective agent for a better future. With all the changes that have occurred over the years of education, the one thing that has almost never changed is the need for all people to be critical thinking people and aware of everything else around them. Human beings are probably the only creatures in the world that are capable of critical thinking, and therefore are the sole agents of future changes. The likely candidates who are ready to take over this role of critical thinking is the group of undergraduate students who are soon to enter the world's economy. This paper will closely scrutinize the role of the critical thinker and elaborate on the methods to measure which can be suitable for all students to learn from so that they in turn can become critical thinkers. This will help affect the ever more necessary future changes for the continual betterment of the world and elucidate the critical thinking measurement methods that will be suitable to use with undergraduate students of all places and levels making it able to reveal, grade, and assess this skillset, which is ultimately important, but difficult to quantify. In this study, the author introduces the addition of a reversed system, the flipped classroom, in conjunction with the established norm of teaching methods.