Mastery Learning: "Let's teach for mastery — not test scores"

Salman “San” Khan is known for his math tutorials on Youtube. He is an American educator who founded the Khan Academy who offers free, world-class education for anyone. Khan Academy has a belief that learners of all ages should have unlimited access to free educational content they can master on their own pace. Its resources ranges from preschool to early college education, comprising math, grammar, biology, chemistry, physics, economics, finance and history. Over 42 million registered users gain access to Khan Academy in Multilanguage across 190 countries. This contribution of him made Khan been profiled on Forbes, and acknowledged as one of TIME’s “100 Most Influential People in the World.” Khan holds three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Sal Khan is also known for his excellent discussions on TED Talks. TED is a media organization which aims to share ideas, in communities around the world ─ usually on the form of short yet powerful talks. The talks cover topics from science to business, to global issues in different languages. Khan’s talk entitled “Let’s teach for mastery – not test scores” uploaded on TED was already viewed over 2 million times. The 10-minute talk emphasizes mainly on the unpopular trend on academic institutions nowadays that standards are quantified through testing.

The cycle in the classroom nowadays is as the teacher demonstrates a skill set, students listen. Next thing happen is for students to practice the skill in the classroom (quiz/worksheets) and at home (homework). Then the next day the class will move on to another skill with the prerequisite understanding of the previous skills then practice as before. Then the day comes when the teacher tests the students, assigned a grade of what you’ve remember ─ and just move on to next skill set. 

This has been the tendency on most of the classrooms nowadays and it seems like the teachers are dealing with programming robots and not a classroom. If this keeps on happening then some students will eventually fall behind.

Khan describes how the learning structure starts to lose control. He revealed, “even though the test identified the gaps in our knowledge... the whole class will then move on to the next subject, probably a more advanced subject that’s going to build on those gaps.” This just means that through test the teacher know, for example, that I didn’t know 20% of the material and maybe even the brightest students in class have 5% they didn’t know; but teacher just proceed to another topic without even re-teaching the things we didn’t know. Worst, these 20% and 5% serves as foundation knowledge yet we were upgrading to advanced skill with lacking basic skills. Then this practice will continue for weeks until we reach some point that we’re becoming unsuccessful because the gaps we had earlier are starting to reappear.

What teacher might not know is when you realized that you’re fallen behind in a class, the student felt small, frustrated and unmotivated. This phenomenon is not far different on the Matthew Effect in reading where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (Stanovich, 1986). This means that in reading, those who didn’t start well in reading are unlikely to catch up. There are numerous verifications that students who do not make good initial progress in learning to read find it increasingly difficult to ever master to process. Children without good phonemic awareness tend to fall behind in which initial success in reading can develop into widespread language and cognitive deficits (Ceci, 1991). On the other hand, children with good understanding on phonemic awareness are well set to make sense of our alphabetic system. Their fast progression of spelling-to-sound association makes them independent readers.

Khan proposes a solution to “fill in gaps, master the concepts, then move on.” This solution is very rational because it really shows the anatomy of how we learn, “you master crawling, before walking... When it comes to new skill sets, we are, in sense, infants” (Anthony, 2017). This is exactly true, take for example, when we are still learning how to write, we started to scribble first, then we learn curves and strokes until we become skilled at writing the numbers and letter in the alphabet. Khan proposes an analogy of learning a musical instrument, practice the basic piece first many times, and only when you’ve mastered it, you proceed to more sophisticated one. This philosophy asserts that students learn well or “master” most of what they are taught and can take along for short-term and long-term social survival.

This pedagogy, which is never new to us, is called mastery learning. Supporters of mastery learning approaches believes that they are flexible, humanistic, educational strategies (Levin, 1974; Scriven, 1975, as cited in Block & Burns, 1979, p. 3); that they can give students the skills needed to prosper in an increasingly open society. John B. Caroll (1963) developed a conceptual method for school learning which is the theoretical basis of mastery learning. He proposed that there should be enough time as student needed to learn the material, and if he spent the necessary time, then he would attain mastery level. To be exact, he believed that the time spent were determined by student’s perseverance, opportunity to learn, or the time needed to learn, where the student’s perseverance was defined as the amount of time the student was willing to engaged in learning, opportunity to learn was defined as the classroom time allotted to learning, and the time needed to learn was determined by the student’s aptitude for the subject, the quality of instruction, and his ability to understand this instruction. The aptitude refers to the time the student would require to learn the skill. The quality of instruction was high, and then the student would readily understand it and would need little additional learning time. However, if the quality of instruction were low, then the student would have difficulty understanding it and would demand much additional learning time. In summary, “the degree of school learning of a given subject depended on the student’s perseverance or his opportunity to learn, relative to his aptitude, the quality of instruction, and his ability to understand this instruction. Mastery learning is correlated with individual instruction.

Mastery learning also aims to let go of the concept that everyone is on the same time schedule. As teachers, we know that every learner learns at his or her pace and not every learner learns the same. As much as this approach in education would entail to have tutors and different worksheets for every student, some may found it impractical. The truth is, it isn’t, and we live in a digital age where everything is possible because of technology which means that learning materials are readily available. Teachers could adapt worksheets and materials online and students could even see an explanation or tutorials on on-demand video. Through this, students could finally master a concept with enhanced mindset, motivation, perseverance and taking agency over their learning.

All things considered, on a blog by Steve Pavlina (2005), he suggested to master the basic first no matter how long it takes. One should secure an “A” grade on every basic skill before moving on to advanced skills. He recognized that mastery is the “fastest way to learn in a long run.” You understand that any early weakness will be detected as you progress, so you take time to lay solid foundation with no gaps. If you ever find yourself stuck on learning and development seems slow, ask yourself if there is a prerequisite skill you haven’t mastered yet. The attitude of mastery causes the learners, as well as the teachers to take a long-term strategic approach to learning.