I suggest taking a look at Engelmann’s “Student-Program Alignment and Teaching to Mastery” and following the guidelines he lays out.

He lays out four criteria:

Criterion 1. Students should be at least 70 percent correct on anything that is being introduced for the first time.

Criterion 2. Students should be at least 90 percent correct on the parts of the lesson that deal with skills and information introduced earlier in the program sequence.

Criterion 3. At the end of the lesson, all students should be virtually 100 percent firm on all tasks and activities.

Criterion 4. The rate of student errors should be low enough that the teacher is able to complete the lesson in the allotted time.

Often the reason students don’t retain what they’ve learned is because the teacher did not provide them with enough distributed practice after the initial teaching.

Engelmann estimates that almost all commercially available curricula need to increase by about 4x the distributed practice provided for mastery learning to occur and for retention to be gained by the students.

I’ve been assessing the mastery way as well, and am rather disappointed in my midterm exam grades. They performed no better than in the years before mastery. (But, perhaps they were weaker to begin with, and so mastery helped? Alas, the lack of a control group!)

Also, if it’s possible, I’m curious as to how their ORIGINAL concept scores (before re-takes) match up the ones on the final exam.

Maybe part of the process is teaching students about the curve of forgetting, or whatever you want to call it. Remind them that once you know something, once you have that mastery, it’s important to keep using it so you don’t forget.

I assigned a portfolio notebook. They had to take their five lowest ranked concepts, complete two examples, and write a verbal explanation for each. Let’s say that half my students turned this in.

This is my second year of working with seniors. “We’ve learned this before” is something I hear a lot. I think they mean “I’ve seen this, I’ve done this, but I don’t really remember it well.”

A one concept, six question test probably does a thorough job in assessing a kid’s ability to apply the ins and outs of a procedure.

vs.

A six concept, six question test probably does a better job at assessing if a student knows when to apply a certain procedure.

Kind of an applications test vs. a procedural competency test. I’m pondering how this would get applied in what order. Maybe trying to throw in two or three cumulative review (multi-concept) applications tests throughout the semester would help predict final exam scores.

Lastly, personally, what would you have predicted to happen for each kid? You’ve seen so much of their work – where you expecting the mastery scores to determine the final, or did you have other intuitions?