An Exploratory Study on the Effects of Blended Learning on Primary 1 Pupils' Achievement and Motivation

The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of blended learning on Singapore Primary 1 pupils' Mathematics achievement and motivation. With increasing prevalence on the use of technology in the daily lives of our pupils, there is an increasing gap between how we teach and how our pupils learn. As such one of the reasons to adopt a blended learning model is to improve pedagogy (Graham, Allen & Ure, 2003). Teachers who anchors their instruction on drill and practice, print and hands-on materials are finding themselves increasingly challenged to capture the attention of pupils, especially the low progress pupils (Shin, Sutherland, Norris and Soloway, 2012). Exploratory findings by Liaw, Krishna, Chng and Ang (2016) suggested that adopting a blended approach to learning potentially leads to a heightening of pupils' motivation in learning Mathematics and their basic numeracy competency. In this study, 39 pupils from a Singapore government school were involved in the intervention that stretched across a four-month duration. Analysis of pupils' pre-post tests were used to discuss the academic achievements of the pupils and a pre-post survey was used to gain a deeper insight of pupils' motivation towards learning of Mathematics. The empirical evidence collected from this study was encouraging. Findings suggests an increase in the academic achievements and slight increase of motivations in the experimental group pupils towards learning of Mathematics. However, further studies may have to be conducted to affirm these initial findings.