شبكة المعلومات العربية التربوية

Teaching students critical thinking skills is much more difficult than teaching them knowledge, since according to students, memorizing information is much easier of acquiring higher ordered skills. Besides, the class we teach is usually heterogeneous, not all students are able to learn within the same time the same concepts. In addition, the restricted number of assigned teaching hours and the race to finish the curriculum on time, don’t always give the teacher enough time to balance between explaining the needed content and training students sufficiently on critical thinking skills especially in Biology at the secondary level. This caused, in my opinion, students to be low achievers in Biology. In this action research, we will try to solve the problem of low achievement of students in Biology through flipped learning. Accordingly, this research aims to enhance the achievement of grade 11 /scientific students in Biology through enhancing specific skills which are formulating a hypothesis and schematizing a textual document by flipping the classroom. A Flipped classroom is a form of blended learning where learners are asked to view short e-learning modules at home or on their own time, to prepare them for their in-person classroom training; so, students are able to attend in-person sessions with specific, informed questions. Such e-lessons can be collected by the teacher from different resources or prepared by the teacher itself. The study includes explaining, through flipped learning, an abstract theme in grade 11 which is gene expression, thus less time is needed for explaining such theme in class, which made me invest class time for training students on the mentioned skills. The content of flipped learning was prepared by the teacher using office mix, a Microsoft office tool. The sample consists of twenty-seven students from grade 11 scientific at a private school. Before the intervention students did a pretest for examining their knowledge in such skills and after the intervention a post test was conducted. The results were compared between pretest and posttest versions. In addition, a questionnaire was performed to examine students’ reflection toward flipped learning. The findings suggest that flipped learning was an effective time management tool to train sufficiently students on critical thinking skills. The two research questions were validated. Accordingly, through quantitative and qualitative analysis of such research it was clear that flipped learning was able to enhance students’ skills thereby enhancing their achievement in Biology. Moreover, after analyzing students’ responses in the questionnaire, students preferred to learn from time to time through flipped classroom, because they enjoyed learning on their pace! Thus, through flipped learning, I am able now to save class time for more practice instead of the “chalk and talk” teaching style. (Author’s abstract)