I think of this week as “mastery” week in my grad educational technology class. This is the unit in which I get to teach the principles of mastery learning which is one of my favorite topics and argue that technology provides the means to make practical the concept of mastery learning which I trace to articles by Benjamin Bloom and Fred Keller fro the late 1960s. Keller’s model for the “personalized system of instruction (PSI)” and Bloom’s notion that the time to learn should be related to the individual’s aptitude for the subject offer suggestions seldom realized in group based instruction.
Technology-based systems offer practical ways to track the achievements of individual students and with teacher support present learning experiences when individual students have mastered prerequisites. The Kahn Academy offers an example likely to be familiar to many educators, but there are other examples. This recent post from the Cult of Pedagogy blog features an individual describing the Modern Classroom Project. I think it is unfortunate that the approach is described as “mastery grading” because that oversimplifies what a mastery approach involves, but ignore the title and consider the ideas raised in the discussion,