The Case for Mastery Learning
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Typical letter grades, they basically measure how much a student learned within a “standard” amount of class time.
So of course, over the course of the year, students are gonna end up at different levels.
I mean, some students only need 5 problems to learn how to add fractions.
Others need 20.
And if the homework only gives them 10, then the second student has to do practice on their own to master it.
And if they don’t, they end up with a lower but passing grade.
And then they move on with all these knowledge gaps that haunt them indefinitely into the future of their math learning.
Every single time they try to learn something new, it’s like, well, this depends on that, which you don’t know, which depends on this other thing that you didn’t really master.
So everything becomes a lot harder than it really has to be.
I mean, how about this?
How about instead of giving everybody the same amount of time and just accepting all these different levels of mastery, why not require a baseline level of mastery where the student knows it well enough to move on, and then give different students different amount of practice so that they can hit that bar?
This teaser is distilled from the following posts, if you want to dive deeper:
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