TPC Journal-Vol 9- Issue 2-Full-Issue

112 The Professional Counselor | Volume 9, Issue 2 Richards (2015) surveyed students who completed a flipped undergraduate health course and found that students reported that the flipped format enhanced their course engagement. Flipped learning is a valuable instructional approach in counselor education, given its student- focused nature. Despite this relevance, research on flipped learning in counselor education is limited (Merlin, 2016). To date, researchers have published only three studies on flipped learning in counselor education. Moran and Milsom (2015) described flipped learning with 15 graduate students in a school counseling foundations course. They assessed student perceptions of the flipped course using Likert scale ratings, and students reported that in-class activities facilitated their learning more than pre-class activities. Fulton and Gonzalez (2015) studied two flipped career development courses by distributing pre- and posttests to students. They found overall increases in attitudes about career counseling. Lastly, Merlin-Knoblich and Camp (2018) conducted a qualitative case study to explore counseling student experiences in a flipped life span development course. Their participants reported that the flipped course was enjoyable, beneficial, and engaged them in learning inside and outside of the classroom. Purpose and Rationale for the Study Previous studies about flipped learning in counselor education are useful in drawing attention to use of the teaching approach in the field (Fulton & Gonzalez, 2015; Merlin-Knoblich & Camp, 2018; Moran & Milsom, 2015). However, across these studies, researchers did not employ a comparison group to examine if flipped learning courses produce different outcomes than non-flipped courses. Given this critical variable in understanding the value of flipped learning, research is needed on the impact the approach has on counseling students compared to non-flipped teaching approaches. To fill this research gap, we chose to compare flipped and non-flipped counseling courses by examining student classroom engagement. Classroom engagement is the amount of active involvement a student has in learning activities while completing a course (Wang et al., 2014). We chose to study classroom engagement for three reasons. First, due to our interest in comparing flipped and non-flipped counseling courses, it was imperative to measure a construct specific to the individual class setting. Student classroom engagement refers to student involvement at the classroom level, which is more specific than overall school engagement (Wang et al., 2014). Second, given the lack of research on outcomes related to flipped learning in counselor education, we sought to understand if the teaching approach appears to impact classroom engagement, which may contribute to greater student enjoyment and better comprehension of counseling concepts. Lastly, although researchers have studied classroom engagement in previous studies on flipped learning, the topic has not been widely reviewed, and a need exists for a greater understanding of how flipped learning impacts student classroom engagement (Faculty Focus, 2015; Lucke et al., 2017; McLaughlin et al., 2013; Simpson & Richards, 2015; Wanner & Palmer, 2015). Our research question was: Do significant differences exist between student classroom engagement levels in flipped counseling course sections and non-flipped counseling course sections? We hypothesized that the classroom engagement levels of students in the flipped counseling course sections would be significantly higher statistically than those of students in the non-flipped counseling course sections.