The Effectiveness of Flipped Classroom in Health Professions Education in China: A Systematic Review

BACKGROUND: Flipped classroom has received much attention during the last few years in China, but inconsistent conclusions are made about the effectiveness this approach in health professions education. This review examined the findings of controlled studies published in Chinese in order to summarize the effects of the flipped classroom methodology. These studies focused specifically on undergraduate level of health professions students. METHODS: A literature search was conducted using China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and Wanfang Data Knowledge Service Platform in June 2019. No date restrictions were used. Peer-reviewed papers were reviewed and experimental studies were included if the study compared student outcomes using flipped classroom method versus traditional lectures. The revised version of the Kirkpatrick’s model was applied to evaluate the effectiveness of the flipped classroom approach. RESULTS: In total, 934 articles were obtained. Among them, 235 articles were full text reviewed and 59 met the inclusion criteria. Most of the student agreed that flipped classroom strategy was very helpful improving their self-learning ability, problem solving ability, teamwork, and communication skills, but reported increased workload and less-efficiency compared with traditional lectures. However, the majority of studies (n = 52) showed positive findings of the flipped classroom on changes in knowledge and skills, and 3 in negative. Among these 59 studies, there was little evidence of changes in behavior, organizational practice and patient outcome. CONCLUSIONS: Better design with reduced content should be considered for instructors to promote learning effectiveness. Long-term effects of flipped classroom should be considered in future studies.