Category: Mastery

By my definition, mastery involves a method of personalization that allows students to progress through content at the rate defined by their proficiency rather than based on a fixed period of time.

NPR on personalization in Education

NPR just published a post on personalization in education. I encourage your reading of this presentation as it covers some territory I have not seen examined in most current coverage of this topic. The piece begins with a focus on mastery learning which has long been a topic that has interested me. I first published on mastery learning in 1978. The NPR post focuses on the technology-enabled forms of mastery learning using the Kahn Academy as an example and does a reasonable job of explaining what the Kahn Academy makes available to K12 students and the support for this effort by wealthy technology donors.

The article then turns to the critics of Kahn and the idea of understanding personalization as attempting to adjust to differences in the time required to learn. The alternative view of personalization as I would describe what is presented in this article is “learning what you want”. I say “alternative view” as I see these goals on different dimensions rather than as education should be one way or the other. Some might describe my perspective as that of blended learning – educational models exist that personalize both opportunities to learn at different rates (mastery learning) and to explore topics of personal interest (20% time project).

Anyway, in the either/or presentation of the NPR piece, there are several perspectives offered by educational thinkers and classroom educators. Here is a statement provided by one of the educators.

“It works really well, like, the first month,” Finn says. Then, students started to progress at different speeds.

“So I have the kids who are on pace, and I have the kids who are perpetually, always behind. And it got to the point where I had 20 kids in 20 spots.”

This point offered as the source of difficulty in using a mastery approach by a classroom teacher captures the challenge, but also the opportunity of a mastery approach. I would suggest that these 20 kids would be at 20 different spots whether exposed to a mastery approach or not. It is the teacher who would be at one spot in a traditional approach. Student achievement varies greatly and this variability increases year by year. To treat everyone as if they were at the same point limits the opportunities of those who could go faster and frustrates the students who can’t keep up. Worse, moving on when many do not understand or are unable to perform the expected skills often increases the difficulty of these students going forward. The way human motivation works, we tend to give up at some point.

The Kahn approach might come across in the NPR description as 20 kids working in a computer lab for hour after hour. One might ask where is the teacher and what is he/she doing. I have read most things available on Kahn Academy and I would suggest that this is hardly the approach that is encouraged. This environment allows the educator to monitor where different students are at and to recognize precisely which students are stuck trying to deal with a given concept or skill. I suppose the teacher could ignore the student’s plight, but I would think this situation would also allow the teacher to work 1:1 as a tutor. The reality of the 20 student classroom the anti-Kahn educator describes provides limited opportunity for tutoring as educators would be spending their time presenting and assessing.

What I am proposing is that ideas such as mastery learning not be understood in some unnecessarily extreme form. There are variants of mastery approaches applied in many settings and several have been investigated multiple times by researchers. Technology offers opportunities to address several of the challenges that limited the practicality of these previous humans-only implementations. Understanding the role of technology and educator should be the goal not painting a picture that pits one against the other.

I provide a more detailed explanation of mastery learning as part of a different source.

Loading

Kahn Academy Mastery Upgrade

Mastery learning is one of those themes I have returned to throughout my career. It always seemed a great idea, well supported in the research literature, but only made practical by the wide availability of technology. Mastery would be my priority way of thinking about personalization.

I first explored mastery learning supported by technology in the late 1970s. I was a graduate student in the Psychology program at Iowa State and with fellow student Mike Latta we began working with biology professor Warren Dolphin. I had been an undergraduate in biology and was already interested in mastery techniques. I recognized that what Dr. Dophin was doing in his introductory biology course was a version of mastery learning. Yes, this was long before the availability of personal computer-based technology. The large-lecture, introductory course including bi-weekly exams completed on the “fill in the dot” answer sheets scored by computer. The way the exams worked the sequences of questions (1-20, 21-40, 41-60, etc.) corresponded to course units. A student could take an exam over any unit covered to that point with the highest score for each unit counting toward the final course grade. The technology made this system practical as multiple scores with hundreds of students were collected every other week. 

Latta, R. M., Dolphin, W. D., & Grabe, M. (1978). Individual differences model applied to instruction and evaluation of large college classes. Journal of Educational Psychology, 70(6), 960-970. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.70.6.960

Mastery learning remained a personal interest for more than 50 years and the role technology could play in individualizing learning only expanded beyond the initial focus on making the assessment component easier to implement.

I return to this topic again encouraged by a recent upgrade to the use of Kahn Academy resources as a mastery system. I think I recognized how such systems might be used for a mastery approach before those who design these systems. I first saw Salman Kahn describe his system as useful for mastery learning in his book – One World Schoolhouse. At that time, his way of describing mastery was fairly primitive. Still, I assigned this book in my grad course focused on technology integration and expanded the description in the textbook with my own explanations of what mastery systems are.

If you are unfamiliar with the free Kahn Academy web site or unaware of the basics of a mastery instructional system, I encourage you to take a look at my brief videos on these topics.

The Kahn approach has grown far more sophisticated and makes a great example of the role technology can play in individualization.

The updates to the Kahn approach is described in a recent announcement.

The changes to the Kahn Academy mastery system include:

Learners now reach 100% mastery from unit mastery alone. The Course Challenge no longer accounts for a separate 20% of mastery points.

Course Challenges remain on the site as an option for learners to accelerate their mastery progress, and an efficient way for a learner with lots of prerequisite knowledge to level up in a course.

Learners can now be moved down based on their performance on a practice exercise as well. If someone is at Mastered and gets between 70% and 99% on an exercise, they will move down to Proficient in that skill. If a learner is at Mastered and gets less than 70% correct, they will move down to Familiar. If a learner is at Proficient and gets anything other than a perfect score, they will move down one level to Familiar

The Kahn Academy makes no assumption that the online system will meet the needs of all. The data collected in student efforts and the efficient way of presenting these data to students and teachers allows the teacher to spot those students who are struggling and focus her/his attention more efficiently. 

Kahn offers a sophisticated approach that includes the recognition that the teacher plays an important role and helps the teacher identify those students most in need of her/his assistance. Too often, when technology is used to fulfill part of the need for content presentation, it is assumed that the educator plays no meaningful role. When used appropriately, this assumption could not be further from the truth. 

Loading

Mastery revisited (again)

Mastery learning is one the concepts I discovered early in my career and that I continue to return to as a great idea just on the edge of meaningful implementation. I see mastery learning as different from other education concepts that continue to reappear even though the efficacy of these ideas is seldom demonstrated. To me, mastery learning is an idea that has waited for a practical method for implementation. Tutoring has always been an approach to implementation responsive to individual differences in learning speed, but the cost effectiveness of tutoring has typically prevented speed of acquisition differences to be accommodated. My interest in technology from the beginning has been related to the potential for personalization. The “personal computer” offers opportunities for many forms of individualization.

Educational historian Larry Cuban has recently begun generating blog posts focused on the Personalized System of Instruction – Fred Keller’s model from the late 1960s (here and here). As a model suited to technological support, PSI offers the best model from the early days. Bloom’s more group-based approach possibly received more attention because of Blook’s conceptual framework and concepts such as formative and summative assessment, but Bloom was also simply better known as an influential figure. I try to get my grad students to consider Keller’s perspective as a better starting point for individualized instruction.

 

Loading