Mastery Learning is essential in providing quality education and removing the old traditional methods of schooling. The main aim of mastery learning is to overcome the drawbacks of teacher-centered methods.
Regardless of the amount of time and resources required, through mastery learning, students can fully understand a lesson.
According to this educational model, teachers must tailor each student’s learning experience, which allows students to get more time to comprehend the material or to acquire a particular skill-based education.
Mastery learning helps in taking different approaches that allow kids to focus on subjects, this makes sure that a child grasps a particular aspect of the subject before going on to the next or more advanced level. Online schools are widely supporting this strategy for good reason.
Contents
Understanding Mastery Learning
Mastery Learning can be defined as the method or procedure of providing knowledge about a specific topic and ensuring that they gain a high level of proficiency in a specific context, before moving to a new topic.
This enables kids to understand the concepts more easily and allows them to have a deeper understanding of each context. These methods allow kids to master their topics and achieve a competence of around 90%.
These methods help in reducing time and enhancing cognitive abilities among kids. Online schools, on the other hand, are promoting a novel strategy that centers on the fundamentals of customized learning rather than the full range of possibilities.
This approach helps in adopting the idea that each student is progressing at their own pace.
Key Principles of Mastery Learning
Mastery learning focuses on providing special education and ensuring that every student completes their knowledge retention within a specific time. This allows kids to enhance their creative thinking skills as well.
Mastery learning works on some core principles, each element has different aspects that allow children to have a favorable learning experience. Below you can check the key principles of mastery learning.
1. Pre-Assessment Learning:
The pre-assesment model is a diagnostic assessment that helps teachers to find the potential misconceptions.
Pre-assessment helps teachers to understand the prior knowledge and findings of students before the beginning of the new topics. These methods help children make the positive learning environment more suitable and better.
2. Group-Based Initial Learning:
Unlike Pre-assesment learning, group-based initial learning helps teachers to clear students’ doubts before the process for a new topic.
This method is done in group-based classrooms or through online group projects, and conducted in the form of group discussions or debates.
3. Regular Formative Assessment:
This principle is very engaging and enhances the understanding level of kids. This allows teachers to understand the students doubts and other factors through feedback.
Through formative assessment, teachers are informed about what students have learned well and what they need to improve on.
4. Parallel Formative Assessment:
This includes the evaluation of studies of students performance. Through parallel formative assessment, teachers can understand the effectiveness of students’ learning and allow them to determine the correct instruction factors.
Through these methods, children can also boost their knowledge and allow them to build a positive study culture.
5. Enrichment Activities:
Activities are also very crucial in promoting quality and understandable education to school students.
Teachers who specialize in mastery learning also offer successful enrichment activities to students who have mastered the subject and don’t require remedial instruction.
Role of Online Schools in Mastery Learning
Mastery learning is very much essential in today’s modern world, which allows kids to enhance their engagement and learning experience.
Various online schools are now focusing on mastery learning as this allows them to have a proper understanding of students’ weaknesses and performance.
Here you can check how online schools are playing an important role in promoting mastery learning.
1. Creates Educational System:
Online learning provides equal learning opportunities to school students irrespective of learners‘ age, personality or situation, which might have made it difficult for them to adjust to the traditional educational system.
Online schools have developed an educational system that works with their schedules and needs. This allows teachers as well to understand the students’ overall performance.
2. Avoids Despondency:
In addition to promoting mastery learning, online schools are dispelling the myth of weak students, sparing the students from the despondency and hopelessness that follows.
Due to this reason, many students find it tough to deal with academics as they don’t have the clarity for basic academics.
3. Prepares Future Leaders:
An online course helps in influencing the future generation of leaders and assisting them in redefining the meaning of failures.
Online schools also help students to find potential solutions for the problems and allow them to switch to alternative approaches.
4. Enhance Team Work:
Mastery learning allows for teaching and supporting one another, students can expand their knowledge and take part in group discussions as well as social activities.
Online education is transforming the educational process and offering hope to everyone irrespective of their background.
5. Enhance Personalised Learning:
Online education promotes self-paced personalized and cooperative learning among students and educators.
Through this, teachers make sure that students learn through engagement and interaction, instead of traditional learning methods. Mastery learning also helps in making the teacher-student relationship more prosperous.
Benefits of Mastery Learning in Online Schools
Mastery learning helps in understanding the student’s performance, it allows to have a proper understanding of concepts and allows for judging the improvement and weaknesses.
Online schools such as 21K schools provide mastery learning through various aspects such as teamwork, personalised learning and so on. Below you can check the benefits of mastery learning.
- Enhance Concentration: Mastery learning allows for enhancing the concentration level of students. Through mastery learning, students are able to understand the concepts more effectively, which allows them to give appropriate time for each concept. Better Understanding helps boost concentration power.
- Boost Efficiency: Mastery learning contains practical approaches and knowledge retention that allow teachers and students to understand performance and efficiency. Through mastery learning, students will be able to understand the impacts this allows them to enhance their efficiency.
- Develop Cognitive Abilities: Mastery learning is known for developing cognitive skills among students. This allows them to enhance the creativity and adaptability through which students become more active, and this leads to the development of student mental health.
- Improve Memorization: Through mastery learning, kids become more self-assured in understanding the concepts in less time. Repeated learning processes will allow kids to increase their memorization speed and enhance their mental levels through proper contextual retention.
- Prepare for the Future: Mastery learning at an early age leads to better preparation, which allows kids to have better clarity about their future. Students who have understood and evaluated their future will lead to future development, through which kids can understand the impact and potential causes.
Challenges of Implementing Mastery Learning Online
Mastery learning provides a distinct method of experiential learning, through enhancing knowledge retention and experiences. Even with so many benefits, mastery learning still faces so many challenges in implementing it in an online course.
The challenges faced in mastery learning hinder the learning outcomes. This also creates problems for online schools in providing quality education. Below, you can check the challenges faced in implementing mastery learning.
- Improper Curriculum: In the education context, there is no mastery learning-related curriculum, due to which it becomes tough for students and teachers to implement new strategies and teaching techniques. This also hinders the process of dynamic education.
- Lack of Accountability: Due to improper educational efforts, students find it tough to maintain accountability. Lack of accountability hinders the learning outcomes and impacts the process of credibility. It creates a challenge for implementing new strategies as well.
- Improper Assessment Feedback: Due to repeated learning attempts, teachers find it tough to get assessment feedback. Due to mastery learning it becomes tough to measure the feedback accurately; due to this, teachers find it tough to maintain the learning output.
- Study Differentiation: It can be challenging to successfully implement online resources in mastery learning and support for students who are having difficulties or require extra challenges. Due to this, it creates hindrances for backward students.
Conclusion
Deep comprehension and proficiency are given precedence over conventional teaching techniques in mastery learning, a revolutionary approach to education.
By developing individualized learning environments that meet the needs of each individual student, encouraging engagement and developing critical thinking abilities, online schools are successfully enabling this model.
Even though problems like curriculum restrictions and accountability concerns still exist, mastery learning’s advantages, such as enhanced focus, cognitive growth and better future readiness, underline its significance in contemporary education.
The next generation of learners will be greatly influenced by the incorporation of mastery learning principles as online education develops further.
