This school year, AP Calculus AB/BC students learned and listened to lectures differently. Math teacher Leslie Hicks is one of the teachers who has flipped their classroom and the results are showing.

For the first time, Hicks has seen higher test scores and advances in students’ work in her calculus class.

She isn’t alone either. In a 2012 survey by Flipped Learning Network, teachers reported a 67% increase in scores and an 80% increase in student attitudes when they implemented a flipped classroom.

This is because the flipped classroom does not have students sitting in a classroom for 55 minutes listening to a teacher lecture and then going home and being lost doing homework. Instead, students watch lectures at home and get help with their homework in class.

A majority of calculus students believe the flipped classroom to be beneficial because they can have their questions answered during class. Along with the quality of the videos on TouchCast, the program that Hicks uses to record her mini-lectures, at home. The concepts from the videos can then be converted into conversations in class amongst the students and they can direct questions toward the teacher.

However, flipping the classroom isn’t for all subjects. Science teacher Stephen Schaffter stopped uploading videos on the school’s Moodle for the fall semester because of personal issues with producing videos.

It can be a pain for teachers to make the videos for students to watch. But on the flip side, it only has to be done once since the same video can be recycled and kept online for years as long as the material stays the same.

With results showing so rapidly in one classroom, a complete turnaround in our own school could perhaps cause a spike in test scores in every subject.