Considering the fact that the Philippines, being the last country in Asia and also one of the remaining three countries worldwide that has a 10-year basic education curriculum, it has now started the implementation of Senior High School for this school year 2016-2017. A lot of collaborations between government agencies and private sectors have been made to plan for the required teachers’ trainings and preparations, construction of additional classrooms, development of textbooks and learning materials, and curriculum reviews to guarantee the success of the K-12 program implementation.
These actions were made because based on records, the Filipino students got low achievement scores in National Achievement Test and even in International Tests like TIMSS. And this fact was also confirmed in a study conducted by SEAMEO-Innotech, where it noted that the Philippines’ basic education is congested in terms of number of years as compared to the curriculum of our neighboring countries, which makes the Filipino students not being able to get the adequate instructional time on their courses, because our current 10-year basic education curriculum is in-fact designed to be taught in 12 years.
The K-12 curriculum was designed mainly to provide sufficient time for mastery of concepts and skills for our graduates to be prepared for higher education, or be employed right after senior high school. So, to support these goals of K-12 program, a gauging tool or a Classroom Response System(CRS) must be adopted to immediately measure the level of understanding of the students on the topic discussed that will feedback the teacher whether to adjust the teaching methodologies or review course contents to ensure understanding and mastery of the concepts and skills. The use of Classroom Response System is now widely embraced by instructors worldwide, which aims to increase the participation of all students during the entire class period, immediately measure the level of their understanding on the topic discussed, and immediately gather feedback and opinions from the students However, this technology is still very costly to implement, each instructor should have a receiver that costs more than P30,000 and each student should have a selector-buttons transmitter that costs more than P5,000. So, for a single class of 40 students, more than P230,000 is needed to implement the use of this technology. Also, aside from the needed subscription for CRS use, the requirement for network infrastructures are very limited or not available in most of the schools in the Philippines. The target beneficiaries of this project are Grade 8 students, because this is where the formation of knowledge begins. The CRS may also be used by other grade levels like Grade 4 students.
The proposed solution to this study is to develop an Android/Web-based CRS, that does not require internet connection, to increase the students’ class participation and immediately assess their level of understanding and mastery on the subject matter.
- The use of mobile phones and Android/Web based mobile app will serve as the respond device of the Classroom Response System. So, a commercial respond device is no longer needed, since every student nowadays has their own mobile phone and the mobile app is downloadable.
- CRS will increase the students’ engagement and participation in class activities as they overcome their reservations in answering questions asked by the instructor as compared to the traditional recitation methodology.
- From the students’ responses, the teacher will be able to determine whether she should spend more time explaining the concept to ensure mastery of the topic, or she can move on to the next topic.
- Teachers can be able to export and save students’ response data for future analysis and assessment
- Teachers can immediately tabulate and graph student responses, and also display the graph on their next presentation