How Mastery Learning Works at Scale

Nearly every adaptive learning system aims to present students with materials personalized to their level of understanding (Enyedy, 2014). Typically, such adaptation follows some form of mastery learning (Bloom, 1968), in which students are asked to master one topic before proceeding to the next topic. Mastery learning programs have a long history of success (Guskey and Gates, 1986; Kulik, Kulik & Bangert-Drowns, 1990) and have been shown to be superior to alternative instructional approaches. Although there is evidence for the effectiveness of mastery learning when it is well supported by teachers, mastery learning's effectiveness is crucially dependent on the ability and willingness of teachers to implement it properly. In particular, school environments impose time constraints and set goals for curriculum coverage that may encourage teachers to deviate from mastery-based instruction. In this paper we examine mastery learning as implemented in Carnegie Learning's Cognitive Tutor. Like in all real-world systems, teachers and students have the ability to violate mastery learning guidance. We investigate patterns associated with violating and following mastery learning over the course of the full school year at the class and student level. We find that violations of mastery learning are associated with poorer student performance, especially among struggling students, and that this result is likely attributable to such violations of mastery learning.