Mastery learning

Mastery learning is a philosophy about learning and teaching that essentially asserts that under appropriate instructional conditions virtually all students can learn well. It places on teachers the responsibility of student learning proposing that they can teach so that all students master most of what they are taught. The goal is to enable students to acquire some basic intellectual competencies ensuring that they can undertake the subsequent learning demanded of them by their schools and eventually their vocations and avocations and which will potentially lead to satisfaction increasing the chances for the development of positive feelings toward learning. Mastery learning strategy is an important development in the field of curriculum studies, which, although criticized for its mechanistic nature, many of its tenets include lesson plans and emphasize instructional techniques, planning and competency assessment, and particular knowledge and skills that are thought of as important for students to live and work in the society. This strategy is influenced by social behaviorism with emphasis given on the formulation of specific instructional objectives attained through instruction sequenced into small steps. The career reward for teachers who use this approach is that their teaching consistently results in high levels of learning for most of their students rather than for just a few.

Mastery learning is typically a group-based, teacher-paced approach to instruction in which students learn, for the most part, in cooperation with their classmates. It is designed for use in typical classroom situations where instructional time and curriculum are relatively fixed and the teacher has charge of a big group of students, and thus, although excessive amount of instructional time cannot be spent in diagnostic-progress testing, student learning must be graded. Students progress through a systematically approached instructional sequence as a group and at a pace determined primarily by the teacher who is the instructional leader and learning facilitator directing a variety of group-based instructional methods together with accompanying feedback and corrective procedures. Particularly, courses or subjects are broken into small units of learning at the end of which students are tested and receive feedback on particular errors and difficulties. Also, students are provided the needed time to learn and the alternative learning opportunities in order to master the predefined intellectual and behavioral competencies. What constitutes mastery is set based on some clear criterion, and successful learning relies primarily on teachers and students rather than on technological devices. Although it can be also implemented in an individual based, self-paced format, it differs from the vast majority of such individualized instructional programs where the teacher primarily gives individual assistance when needed rather than being a principal source of new information. Also, in the latter programs, students generally work at their own pace, independently of their classmates, using carefully designed, self-instructional materials and move onto new material only after they have mastered perfectly each unit.

Many elements of mastery learning were observed via empirical research as integral parts of successful teaching and learning. Some of these observations included the conviction that many students lack the needed sophistication and motivation to be effective self-managers of their own learning; mastery learning's consistently positive effects, although it did not yield the large effects on student learning proposed as possible by its advocates; and the quality of instruction, the strikingly improved student learning outcomes, and the effectiveness of schools evidenced worldwide.

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