Exploring the Benefit of Blogs Dependency for Assessing Students’ Intellectual Achievement

Abstract

Blogs stand out among many social media that allows teacher and students to maintain a running dialogue in various aspect of the teaching and learning process. It comes in form of thoughts, ideas, tests, short-works/homework and assignment to enhance interactivity between the teacher’s knowledge base and students’ comments and reflections. This paper promotes the use of blogs in assessing students’ intellectuals while comparing the use of blogging for assessment as well as the use of traditional assessment. The study stresses scoring on paper versus scoring on blogs, students that we're able to complete their visitation of the blogs were noted to enjoy and benefit greatly compare to those that could not finish theirs and whether the performance of male bloggers may be different from that of female bloggers. 45 students involved in this study from among degree students of Achievers University. The research study was done within a semester. The achievement test was the major instrument used to collect data from the same students that were exposed to two different tests (Paper Test/Traditional Test and Blogging Test) after proper classroom teaching. The results got were analyzed using mean, SD and T-test statistics. From the findings, it was succinctly shown that the scores of students engaged in blogs far better than when they initially tested traditionally. In the same trend, those students that completed their test on blogs demonstrated high performance than their counterparts that could not. Further, the results also made it crystal clear that students were distributed equally on blogging regardless of their gender differences. The findings from the interview conducted established the fact that the use of a blog for assessment saves student time, the distance for learning and having quick result as feedback. The student has a high interest in the use of a blog for academic purposes rather than only the social affairs of the student. The paper contributes to the existing knowledge by turning blogs as social media into academic media that can foster the academic achievement of students and can also be used to assess students better than traditional assessment.