Impact of blended learning approach on students’ achievement and mental effort

Most researchers are interested in investigating the impact of a blended learning approach (BLA) on students’ performance, yet this approach’s instructional efficiency has not yet been quantified. Therefore, this research aims is to determine the impact of teacher-created online Moodle-based materials in combination with face-to-face learning on student achievement and mental effort, i.e., to determine the instructional efficiency of applied teaching approaches at physics classes in high school. For this research, we chose to teach students physical principles of direct current, which involves abstract concepts. Using BLA, students can prepare better for a real experiment in the lab, and this approach also creates a safe environment for the student while providing the ability to demonstrate the learned physical phenomena. The Moodle platform course is developed for this purpose and implemented in a BL environment. Students are gradually guided from easier to more difficult concepts in this research, considering the working memory’s capacity and the teaching material requirements. Our results show that the students who used BLA achieved higher scores on the knowledge test, and they also used less mental effort than students that used a conventional teaching approach. We also show that instructional efficiency for BLA is positive and significantly higher than the instructional efficiency of the conventional approach. This research’s results are primarily designed for physics teachers to understand the effects of the BLA better and apply teaching approaches that respect the principles of cognitive development of a child.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author