The primary purpose of classroom assessment is to determine how well students are learning on a continuous basis and to take necessary corrective action as soon as possible to improve their learning. This paper describes a computerized assessment technique that can be used effectively and easily in large classes. The technique allows instructors and students to monitor the learning process on a daily basis and to quickly point out the need for corrective action, if necessary. Students can view their performance and also the average class performance on the web. The graphical displays allow them to see the trend of their performance over several days. Several reports, automatically generated for instructors, allow them to determine promptly how well certain concepts or topics are learned by students. Use of special codes and optical scanning sheets minimize paper shuffling in large classes, and the computer program automatically grades and updates the database. The program is fairly general and has friendly interfaces; thus, it can be implemented for use by faculty at other universities. According to student response sheets, 80 to 97 percent of the students find different aspects of the technique to be effective in improving teaching‐learning in large classes.

Two locally created databases are made available to the world via the Web using an inexpensive but highly functional search engine created in-house. The technology consists of a microcomputer running UNIX to serve relational databases. CGI forms created using the programming language Perl offer flexible interface designs for database users and database maintainers.