Waymaker Faculty Training

What Is Mastery Learning?

De ning Mastery Learning

Useful De nitions

Disclosure Note: This section includes terms that are de ned and used
di erently by reputable scholars. This lack of broadly accepted
de nitions requires that each body of work provide local de nitions. The
de nitions below are provided by Lumen Learning for the purpose of
clarity in this context.

What is Mastery Learning and how is it unique?

Mastery Learning. Bloom (1968) describes mastery learning as follows:

If students are normally distributed with respect to aptitude for some

subject (mathematics, science, literature, history, etc.) and all the
students are provided with the same instruction (same in terms of
amount of instruction, quality of instruction, and time available for
learning), the end result will be a normal distribution on an
appropriate measure of achievement. Furthermore the relationship
between aptitude and achievement will be relatively high…

Conversely, if the students are normally distributed with respect to

aptitude, but the kind and quality of instruction and the amount of
time available for learning are made appropriate to the
characteristics and needs of each student, the majority of students
may be expected to achieve mastery in the subject. And, the
relationship between aptitude and achievement should approach
zero…
 Carroll’s (1963) view [is] that aptitude is the amount of time required
by the learner to obtain mastery of a learning task. Implicit in this
formulation is the assumption that, given enough time, all students
can conceivably attain mastery of a learning task. If Carroll is right,
the learning mastery is theoretically available to all, if we can nd
the means for helping each student.

Mastery learning, then, is about providing a range of di erentiated

instructional supports to students in order to help each student achieve
mastery (rather than just leaving them behind when the unit is over).
Because of Bloom’s desire to develop instructional strategies that can
be used by all teachers in all classrooms, he imagined these
di erentiated strategies being deployed inside the con nes of the
standard semester or academic year. Mastery-based approaches
frequently include supplemental resources to students who fail to
succeed on assessments on their rst attempt, as well as additional
attempts on assessments after they have taken additional time to rework
through the original or additional resources.

The Carnegie Unit and Time Based Learning. The currency of formal
higher education as we know it is the Carnegie Unit, which is a time-
based standard of student progress. In the traditional educational model,
students take courses that are organized in terms of time. Our reliance
on the Carnegie Unit insures that every student receives the same
amount of instruction. However, while the amount of time is held
constant for every student, the amount of learning varies dramatically
across students. Some students achieve each and every learning goal
set by their faculty. Other students fail to achieve any of the learning
goals set by their faculty. But both sets of students receive their As and
Fs at the end of a common, xed period of time (like a semester or a
quarter).

Competency Based Education. Building on mastery learning ideas,

Competency Based Education decouples classes from the Carnegie Unit
completely, turning the traditional time /learning relationship on its head.
In a CBE setting, the amount of learning is held constant and the amount
of time is allowed to vary. Rather than spend a xed amount of time in a
course, students remain in a course until they are capable of
demonstrating su cient mastery of all the course competencies. Some
students may come into the formal educational experience with a
signi cant amount of previous learning in informal contexts. These
students will likely be able to demonstrate mastery of course
competencies within a week. At that point, the course will be over for
them. Other students may need 20 weeks to reach a level of pro ciency
where they can demonstrate su cient mastery of course competencies
to complete the course.

While Mastery Learning (ML) and CBE both try to help students achieve
mastery rather than leaving them behind at the end of an arbitrary
period of time, they di er from each other in two main ways:

Historically, ML has been used inside the con nes of the traditional
time-based system while CBE has worked to displace the Carnegie
Unit with measures of learning achievement.

More often than not, proponents of ML are focused on how to

insure that the learners who would not succeed otherwise are able
to succeed. By contrast, more often than not proponents of CBE
are focused on how the learning experience for people who come
to school with pre-existing knowledge and experience can be
accelerated.

What is a “personalized” approach to learning?

Most traditional instructional models ignore the knowledge, skills and

experience that students bring to a course. These traditional models
privilege the amount of time learners spend in class over what they
know. Students who come into the course with signi cant expertise are
required to spend the same amount of time – an entire quarter or
semester – as students who enter the course as complete novices. By
contrast, a personalized approach takes each students’ experience into
account, automatically creating a unique pathway through the course
based on an assessment of the knowledge and skills each student
brings to the course.

What are the key elements of course design in these

instructional models?

Leaving aside key elements of e ective course design for all courses,
the key elements of e ective ML course design include:

First and foremost is assessment design. This is addressed in

response to the next question below.

Providing explicit support for students to help them see how a

group of individual learning outcomes t together to make up
a competency, supporting synthesis and integration.

Designing the di erentiated instructional supports that some

students will need in order to achieve mastery.

Deciding which elements of the di erentiated instructional

supports will be provided by teachers, which by peers, and
which by automated systems.

How do assessments work?

It’s useful to answer this question generally before answering it in the

speci c context of Mastery Learning.

It is impossible for us to know with certainty whether or not a student

has learned something we hoped they would learn. We cannot open
their heads and look to see if the desired information is “in there” –
direct observation is impossible. Consequently, assessment is the art of
taking indirect measures and bringing these data together into an
argument about the likelihood that a student has learned what we hoped
they would.
For example, suppose we want to determine if a student has learned
what we wanted them to know about factoring polynomials. We could try
to determine this by asking them to respond to a multiple choice
question with a correct answer and three distractors. If a student
answers this question correctly, our con dence that s/he has learned
what we wanted them to increases, but there’s still a chance that they
may have simply guessed the correct answer. We can decrease the
chance that they guessed correctly by giving them 5 multiple choice
questions. We could decrease it further by giving 25, or 50, or 100
questions. Or we could take another tack altogether, and ask them to
factor one or more polynomials and show their work. Or we could bring
them into the o ce and interview them about how polynomials are
factored.

Each of these assessment methods creates a certain amount of

con dence in us that a student has learned. We can increase our
con dence by using a larger number of low con dence measures (like
multiple choice) or by using a higher con dence measure (like an essay).
As a rule, increasing our level of con dence comes at a cost in time and
resources – grading 10 multiple choice items instead of one, or grading
an essay instead of 10 multiple choice items, etc.

In a true ML setting, students demonstrate mastery of foundational

learning before moving on. This suggests the need for con dence in our
assessments, together with a bias towards applied skills, expertise, and
actually doing things with value in the real world. As the name implies,
performance assessments are designed in such a way that they require
a student to actually perform the desired behavior, as opposed to just
describe the desired behavior. For example, we wouldn’t ask students
multiple choice questions about grammar rules, we would ask them to
correct an essay riddled with mistakes. We wouldn’t have them describe
the rules of basketball, we would have them play a game. We wouldn’t
have them describe the way the stock market works in an essay, we
would have them invest (fake money, of course!) in the market.

To insure consistency, accuracy and fairness in grading performance

assessments, we create rubrics at the same time we design the
performance task the student is to complete. Rubrics help score multiple
assessments consistently, and also help the same person score
assessments consistently over time. Rubrics can be continuously
improved over time by measuring their inter-rater reliability – the degree
to which the scores of di erent raters, using the same rubric to judge the
same performance, provide similar or divergent scores – and iteratively
re ning the rubric in order to maximize the inter-rater agreement.

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