Competency education is attracting significant interest as a promising way to help meet our national priority of ensuring that all young people are ready for college and careers. In competency-based schools, students advance at different rates, based on their ability to demonstrate mastery of learning objectives. Teachers provide customized…

For the nation as a whole, there is a moving bandwagon of educational change, clearly hitched to attempts to personalize and individualize instruction. The new emphases on the quality of learning appears to offer some potential solutions to two current problems: the twin problems of quality and equality in education. Traditional group-oriented…

Presents a theory of school learning that attempts to explain individual differences in school learning as well as to determine the ways in which such differences may be altered. (MP)

Mastery learning has been called cold and impersonal. On the contrary, it is humane because it allows for individual differences, emphasizes each student's ability to master the subject at hand, and provides honest and opencommunication between students and instructors. (DC)

Mastery learning can be described as a set of group-based, individualized, teaching and learning strategies based on the premise that virtually all students can and will, in time, learn what the school has to teach. Inherent in this description are assumptions concerning the nature of schools, classroom instruction, and learners. According to the…

An examination of any school curriculum would reveal the existence of "basic" subjects such as reading, writing, and computation. Therefore a "return to basics" is not needed but rather a change in methodology in teaching these subjects. The following methodological changes are suggested: (1) Test each child to ascertain the level of achievement…

Bloom has argued that most students, not just a few, should be able to do top quality school work if given appropriate instruction. Mastery learning, which includes frequent diagnostic testing followed by remedial instruction, has been proposed as an effective strategy for increasing pupil achievement. In this study, teachers used a mastery…