The Classroom Performance System and the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics

The teaching and learning of mathematics often involves a lot of drill and practice questions. Teachers are burdened with the marking of questions with one numeric value responses. The essence of the exercises are not merely for pupils to practice but also for the teacher to be able to determine the area of weakness or difficulty of the pupils' in mathematics and provide appropriate feedback and support. Teachers with all the extra work given often do not have the time or energy to analyse every exercise. In fact marking is often done a week once or even a month once and sometimes the teacher provides the answers and requests the pupils to mark the numerous questions. Today a 21st century tool called "Classroom Performance System" enables pupils to key in every numeric value answer to given questions and the marking is done instantly and so is the analysis. This paper describes a priori study on the effects of the use of the Classroom Performance System in the teaching and learning of mathematics in Malaysia. The study involves 20 primary school pupils in a Malaysian Primary school who face difficulty memorising their times tables. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.