Blended Assessment: A Strategy for Classroom Management

The classroom is an environment where teachers constantly need to make decisions on planning instructional activities, monitoring students’ progress and evaluating teaching effectiveness. One way to monitor students’ progress is by giving assessment. Assessments which can be formal or informal, are used to gather information about students’ achievement. Previously, lecturers used the traditional paper-and-pencil assessment which proved to be tedious and time consuming for large classes. To facilitate a more efficient and quicker marking and to provide feedback to students immediately, the researchers looked into the potential of blended assessment in Probability and Statistics which comprised of 500-600 second year engineering students at Universiti Teknologi Petronas. Implemented in this course for January 2009 semester, blended assessment is the use of technology specifically the Wiley Plus and MOODLE combined with the traditional mode of testing. Findings of this study revealed that this method has significantly reduced the number of hours spent on marking and enabled immediate feedback for students.