The struggles of a field study: Studying the effectiveness of a flipped classroom

Flipping the classroom is an increasingly popular method to support student learning in higher education. One of the aims of this educational approach is to engage students from the start and throughout the course by facilitating active processing of study content and discouraging procrastination. We conducted field research to gain insight into students’ study behaviour throughout such a course. Bi-weekly online surveys were used to gather data among 200 students. Additionally, we kept track of lecture attendance and gathered information on students’ perceptions about the course. This case study is an account of the struggles we encountered during our field study: decreasing diary response rates and students’ negative feelings about the course, which potentially biased our findings. From this project we take away some valuable lessons, which we would like to share with other (novice) researchers.