Talk:Mastery learning/Archive 1

Question
What does the flow model have to do with "Mastery Learning"? Csikszentmihalyi's work is not even referenced in the article.
 * That's what I thought when reading that page just now. Let's remove it? Nicolas STAMPF (talk) 13:19, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

71.89.85.85 (talk) 03:30, 18 March 2011 (UTC) Prof H.

New or old?
Excuse me, but I thought this was the normal way of learning anything. You can't go on to the next topic or level, until you've learned the prerequisites for it. For example, students who want to take calculus must have passed algebra and probably had same trigonometry or analytic geometry.

The sequential nature of learning where a student cannot progress to the next level without demonstrating mastery of a preceding level works best, I would suggest, in two areas of education; firstly in hierarchical and fact-based subjects like science and mathematics, and secondly in theory, rather than the often less-than-perfect real world of classroom learning. I am sure everyone can recognise the student who is promoted along with his or her peers on a chronological basis despite having only a vague understanding of important formative concepts and principles taught in the preceding year, and these gaps prevent subsequent topics from being understood and a vicious circle sets in with the student falling further and further behind. The technical term for this is 'failure'. The theoretical framework provided by Benjamin Bloom and further developed by James Block postulated that this was more a failure of the educational process to allow for the individual learning needs of some students than the students themselves; and this failure was often related to the time allowed for a certain topic and when this time had been exhausted the students were then led to the next topic, whether or not they had achieved mastery of the current subject. The essence of Mastery Learning involves decoupling the rigid nature of the time/mastery expectation embedded within the curriculum of most subjects so that instead of the time taken being fixed which often leads to a percentage of students failing to master the topic before being forced to move on, the time element becomes flexible and the student does not move on until mastery has been achieved. In the decades immediately following the promulgation of this model the debate centred around two aspects (a) the philosophical debate which acknowledged this approach to have a populist, egalitarian, and to some a decided 'lean to the left' basis which is at odds to the established paradigm of gold, silver, bronze and also-ran educational outcomes and (b) the obvious and to many insurmountable practical impediments to being able to manage multiple streams of individualised instruction programmes with the same level of resource allocated ... in other words how could any classroom teacher expect to contemplate such a proposition when they are barely able to copy with the current demands of their profession. However what may have been seen as insurmountable in a pre-digital age may now be simply 'challenging' rather than 'impossible'. In reviewing the original post on his subject I found nothing that indicated bias and wonder if perhaps the debate alluded to above still continues in some quarters. Monty1956 (talk) 18:28, 22 December 2014 (UTC)

Is it a "learning model" or a "classroom management model" that posits covering material at a uniform rate for dozens of children at a time, regardless of how well each assimilates the material? --Uncle Ed (talk) 23:49, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
 * the idea is that the slowest student dictates the schedule, while the better students are left hanging until the slowest one has caught up. Neglecting the best students while devoting all attention to the worst students doesn't sound so good, though, so they just talk about the "shrinking gap". This is, of course, a terrible idea in practice, but it sounds very good in politically correctness discourse on ho "no child" is  "left behind". --dab (𒁳) 13:06, 4 March 2013 (UTC)

Dbachmann, your argument is really interesting and quite relevant. However, mastery learning doesn't neglect the fastest studends (I won't call them "best"). On the contraty, it is given the opportunity to the slowest students to fill the gaps as long as the fastest students do can go along with the subjects, and even helping the slowset students, which helps on the building of each others comprehension. That's what Khan Academy allows, using technology: students do not depend on a teacher in front of them to learn. The video-lectures (a "home-work") are the teacher while today's homework (problem-solving) is done in class with teacher and everyone else.--Marcolovatto (talk) 03:49, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Theory & Practice Sections
Will it be beneficial to instead separate these categories, to have LFM and PSI as the two main categories, and cover theory and practice within? It seems like there might not be enough content to justify this detailed categorization. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gayowsky (talk • contribs) 21:58, 12 July 2015 (UTC)