The comments of this article also provide some insights into how people feel about mastery, one student shared his experience in a school that took a mastery based approach.

They are the result of years of poor grading practices.” He follows up to say that the goal of the education system is to help students achieve mastery of the subject and not to sort and rank students using a traditional A-B-C grading scale. The author states “I firmly believe the problems of the American education system are not the result of years of poor teaching practices. This article by Education Week: “ Why Grades Should Reflect Mastery, Not Speed” offered a very scathing criticism for teacher’s grading practices.

I have also struggled with these questions, and find many expert opinions that differ. Should students be allowed to work at their own pace? If mastery is the goal, then shouldn’t students be given an indefinite amount of time to achieve such mastery?.Should homework be graded at all or is it just a tool to achieve mastery, which is then measured by a summative assessment?.Should students be allowed to retake tests until they have achieved a minimum grade (showing mastery of the concept)?.The arguments center around philosophical differences about how a traditional grading scale and the idea of mastery overlap. The idea of mastery can actually be a contentious one, and I’ve had the most heated arguments with other teachers regarding how to grade and how to achieve content mastery. His ideas about mastery in learning seem to be making the rounds these days with regard to Common Core Standards, that is the idea is that students should be required to master a topic before moving on to the next one. You probably are familiar with the man, and may even have a poster in your class showing “Bloom’s Taxonomy.” Every student in education knows Bloom. The idea that learning for mastery was proposed many years ago by Benjamin Bloom.

Mastery of content knowledge