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.