Student Preferences Impact Outcome of Flipped Classroom in Dental Education: Students Favoring Flipped Classroom Benefited More

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article presents impact of the implementation of the flipped classroom in the dental education. The article is typical educational research article. But I lack research questions, research hypotheses and a proper statistical evaluation of hypotheses in the article. Research questions, hypotheses should be introduced, complemented by pedagogical research.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This is an interesting paper investigating flipped classroom. However, I have a few concerns regarding the study.

1. The current study is based on one time experiment, according to the study design. I don't think the result from this one time activity is strong enough to support your conclusion. The authors should consider including more data points.
2. The study design has some flaws. Students favoring or less favoring the flipper classroom were compared on their performance in the quiz. However, students preference toward flipped classroom was determined by the survey after the module. This might cause some bias toward the result. Students who probably had interest in flipped classroom before the module might performance better in the quiz, but lost interest after the actual class. The author need to consider collect the survey before the module. 
3. A few more details should be described in the study. For example, the instructor of the flipped classroom. Did the instructor received any proper training? Did she or he had any prior teaching experience? etc. In addition, the survey used to measure students preference seems to be a self-developed instrument. So is it verified? If it was not self-developed, what's the psychometrics of the survey. More details regarding the instrument should be included. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Review of Manuscript education-1148744 Student Preferences Impact Outcome of Flipped Classroom in Dental Education The manuscript, Student Preferences Impact Outcome of Flipped Classroom in Dental Education, describes an educational experiment to design a flipped classroom that addresses multiple learning styles. Given some cues in the manuscript, it is obvious that the authors had already published on the issue of flipped classrooms. As such, they presented a compact but significant review of literature that informed the rest of the manuscript. Something lacking in the manuscript is a discussion of the theoretical framework of the flipped classroom. In a few words, the manuscript is contextualized in a practical way instead of on a theoretical one. The research design, while it seems commonsense, it does not include specific research questions or hypotheses. The methods, however, are clearly described but the reader does not know if selecting to have on pre-class activity (as opposed to more), or to have the first quiz for no credit was something that came from authors’ personal choice or if it was based on previous research. Another unclear point in the manuscript is the in-class assignment. Was this assignment an individual or group assignment? What was the impact on the experiment results if some students completed the assignment in groups or individually? The arguments in the discussion of the findings are coherent and balanced but not so much compelling. That is, research has shown that students who spend more time interacting with class materials usually perform better in assessments. Having the extra activity happen before the class provided students with more time to think and interact with the content. Also, there was not a mechanism in place to make sure that students went over the materials before taking quiz 1, so the reality is that some of the low performers could have chosen not to study the materials first. This issue was discussed by the authors but no solutions were presented. The results are clearly presented in tables and in narrative formats and the authors used standard analysis procedures to find them. The conclusions are supported by the literature and the results and there are enough references to know that the manuscript was based on previously published literature.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The previous issues were address in the limitation section.