To truly appreciate the importance of mastery learning, you need to understand the context in which Benjamin Bloom developed the idea and the boldness of what he proposed. Bloom not only challenged long-held notions about the development of talent in young people and the influence of educators; he proved himself a courageous and steadfast champion of equity and social justice.
As educators, our task is find ways to respond to students’ learning problems so that learning outcomes become much less predictable. Although there are limitations to what we are able to accomplish, we should be trying to defy prediction. We should be searching for ways to intervene in the educational process in order to guarantee a higher quality of learning for all students. Mastery Learning can help us accomplish this.
The first task in implementing mastery learning is to clearly articulate what we want students to learn and be able to do at the end of each learning unit. In other words, we need to begin with the end in mind by clarifying our learning goals. This resource will support you to begin this work and includes a practical example and a discussion of how implement learning goals in the context of mastery learning.
To determine if implementing mastery learning has led to meaningful change and positive improvements requires some form of evaluation. We need to verify whether or not intended outcomes were achieved and also if there were positive or negative unintended consequences that resulted from implementation. This resource includes a discussion on three types of data you can collect to evaluate mastery learning.