Mastery Learning Sounds Great — But It Can Run Off the Rails
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses how mastery learning, when applied to the wrong content or without proper pacing, can slow instruction to a crawl.
Key Takeaways
- Mastery learning has limits - Requiring mastery of every single skill before moving on can dramatically slow curriculum pacing
- Not all content requires mastery - Some knowledge is better revisited and built upon over time rather than perfected before proceeding
- Pacing matters as much as depth - Spending too long on early content means students never reach later material they also need
Transcript
Mastery learning sounds great, but I think we're using it too much in subjects where it's not necessary, and we're probably not using it enough in the small number of subjects where it is necessary.
So I think most knowledge that kids need to learn in K-12 is not really hierarchical.
There are not really strict dependencies where you have to learn this thing before you can learn that thing.
Now, that is often true, not always, but frequently true in math, that there are knowledge prerequisites.
But if we take that idea of mastery learning and we say, well, kids have to be at 80% or 100% or whatever number we pick with this content before they move on to the next content, Well, if those aren't strict prerequisites, we're giving ourselves a problem.
We're creating a time issue, and that time has to come from somewhere, right?
Like if we're not going to move on yet, if we're going to spend more instructional time on this content that a kid has not mastered yet, where is that time going to come from?
If that content is truly prerequisite, if it is absolutely critical that the student master that content before moving on, again, as it often is in math, we're going to probably have to provide some sort of extra period, some sort of lab class, and I think double math or double reading or lab classes for either one are probably a good idea because often some kids do need more time in reading and math and it is pretty critical to their success.
But reading is not hierarchical.
Reading does not have the strict prerequisites all the way throughout the way math does.
There are very few reading lessons where you would say, we're not going to move on to the next lesson until this kid has mastery or until the whole class has mastery.
Like it just creates too much of a pacing problem.
And a lot of people respond to that by saying, well, that's because you're trying to do the whole class.
You should do individual self-paced or individual pacing to mastery.
And the problem there is that for all the kids who need more time, they still run out of time, right?
You still run out of time with them.
And what happens is you don't get to things at the end of the year that you really needed to get to in order for students to be ready for the next year.
So I think we habitually cut off the end of the curriculum, sometimes as much as half of the curriculum.
in the name of mastery.
And what is the student's percent mastery of curriculum we didn't get to at all?
Well, it's probably pretty close to zero.
And I think we really have to ask ourselves, is mastery of this content so crucial?
Is this such a strict prerequisite for what we're going to teach them next that we are okay with either providing a whole lot more time to get them to mastery, or are we okay with them not getting to other content at all?
Let me know what you think.