Five years of Mastery Learning: What did we learn?

Abstract

Over the last five years we have developed our first year, first semester programming course into a mastery learning oriented course -- a delivery format allowing students to work at their own pace towards the achievement level they aim for. In this paper, we report on a series of changes to the course and how these impacted students' engagement, their learning progress and their final grades. We aim to initiate a discussion on fostering self-regulated learning early on in a course.