What are the practical aspects of mastery learning and its impact on student achievement? Key components of this educational model, including the importance of feedback, individualized pacing, and a focus on competencies rather than time can help students become aware of their own abilities and become more self-directed learners, ensuring that students fully grasp a concept before moving on, and fostering a deeper understanding and retention of knowledge.
Where did mastery learning come from? And what does it look like when successfully implemented? That’s just what Thomas Guskey (The mastery Learning and grading expert) covers in this excerpt from the Leaders Coaching Leaders Podcast episode, Mastery learning.
PETER DEWITT: So, what is mastery learning?
THOMAS GUSKEY: OK. Mastery learning was actually developed by Benjamin Bloom in the late 1960s. He wrote about this initially in 1968. And it was Bloom who brought to education the idea that assessments can be a part of the instructional process. Prior to this hallmark work of Bloom, we always had this idea that assessments occurred at the end of instruction. They were primarily evaluation devices to determine who had learned well and who had not. Grades were recorded. They were summarized in some later time.
And Bloom came along in 1968 and described a process whereby assessments could actually be a learning tool and a part of the instructional process. His idea was that these should be devices that inform students about how well they’re doing and inform teachers about how effective their instruction was. It was Benjamin Bloom in 1968 who brought the word formative assessment to education…
PETER DEWITT: So…I guess one of my…questions for you is, you travel around the world; You work with lots of schools and organizations. Where have you seen mastery learning done well? And what does that look like in a classroom environment?
THOMAS GUSKEY: Yeah, well, I always stress that we need to consider where Bloom drew his ideas from in developing mastery learning. And he really drew those ideas from two different sources. The first was a group of studies on tutoring because he thought of all instructional conditions that has to be best. I mean think of it. If we could provide for every student an excellent tutor who could work one on one with them the entire school day, what wonderful results we might get.
Or consider if we could reduce class size to one. But what is it happens in that one tutor, one student interaction that really makes it so effective? And are there aspects of that we could carry over to group-based instruction?
And then very sort of thoughtfully, but cleverly, Bloom looked at another set of studies that had analyzed the strategies of successful students in group-based classrooms. So what do successful kids do that less successful kids don’t do?
And it was from those two sources of evidence that Bloom drew is ideas for the mastery learning. If you think about mastery learning, it’s exactly what teachers do when they tutor an individual student. If they’re tutoring a student and the student makes a mistake, the teacher doesn’t go on.
The teacher stops, points out the mistake to the student. That’s feedback. Tries to re-explain that idea or concept in a different way. That’s corrective. Then asks another question or pose another problem to ensure the student understands it before going on. And all Bloom is trying to do is give us a way that we can carry over that same highly effective take to a group-based instructional environment.
And plus, it’s exactly what the very best kids have always done for themselves. I mean if you think about that, what do the very best students in any class do when the teacher hands back an assessment? Well, number one, they always save it. They go over it and look at what they got right and what they get wrong.
For those things that go wrong, they rework those problems. They look up the answers. They ask the teacher about it so they don’t make those same mistakes again.
But how different it is from the poor students. What do they do with that assessment? Well, it’s in a trash can as they’re going out the door, if they wait until then.
So the very best students have always used assessments as a way to gain feedback on their learning and to correct the learning problems.
Bloom’s idea was, can we help teachers structure learning environments in such a way that they can compel all of their students to do exactly what their very best ones always did for themselves?
And so I think that in those early efforts to implement mastery learning, those were the things that were really emphasized, taking those two sources of evidence and applying it to group-based instruction, seeing what elements we could transfer that environment to lead to the very positive results we had…
