Why isn't every child using Mastery Learning?

Are schools leaving $20 bills on the sidewalk?

Austin Scholar writes,

Learning your math facts to fluency (e.g. memorizing your multiplication tables) is a critical skill that many schools have simply stopped teaching. We have found that Alpha students with the best math fluency learn 2.5x faster while those who don't have fluency learn at just 0.8x the baseline speed.

She refers to an online book, The Math Academy Way. That book in turn refers to education researcher Benjamin Bloom, who contrasted talent development with schooling as we know it.

In talent development, however, instruction is completely individualized. Learning tasks are chosen based on the specific needs of individual students, each student must learn each skill to a sufficient level of mastery before moving on to more advanced skills. Students progress through skills at different rates, but learn skills to the same threshold of performance. Their progress is measured not by their level of learning in courses that they have taken, but rather by how advanced the skills are that they can execute to a sufficient threshold of performance.

Let me use the term “mastery learning” to cover the sort of teaching methods that build knowledge by breaking topics down to specific skills that are taught in a specific sequence, drilling those skills, and ensuring that a student has each skill before moving on to the next. Close relatives to mastery learning include phonics and Direct Instruction, which also have encountered resistance from mainstream educators.

The authors write,

Benjamin Bloom (1985) observed that the journey to developing a talent could be divided into three phases in which the student’s activity in the talent area transitioned from fun and exciting playtime, to intense and strenuous skill refinement, to developing their individual style and pushing the boundaries of the field.

…Math Academy carries students through the second stage of talent development, which centers around intense and strenuous skill development. In this stage, it is assumed that students are motivated, be it intrinsically or extrinsically, to engage in particularly effortful forms of practice that maximize their learning.

My emphasis. As Austin Scholar puts it,

Don’t focus on the app, focus on the motivation.

After listing some best practices as found by educational researchers, the MA authors write,

However, the disappointing reality is that the practice of education has barely changed, and in many ways remains in direct opposition to the strategies outlined above.

…The common theme throughout the literature is that effective cognitive learning strategies often deviate from traditional conventions, which are held in place by convenient misconceptions about learning.

They describe the game that others have called “We pretend to teach, and they pretend to learn.”

while teachers generally want their students to learn, they also receive substantial pressure from parents and administrators to make the learning process feel comfortable and enjoyable, and check boxes on people’s intuitions (however mistaken) about learning, while simultaneously ensuring that students don’t fall behind on any standardized tests. A teacher’s goal is often for their students to perform well enough not to raise eyebrows from parents and administrators, while minimizing the amount of griping from students (and parents) about how much effort is required.

Consider two hypotheses:

1. Mastery learning works, but educators refuse to adopt it.

2. Mastery learning does not really work. Instead, good results appear only in special settings in which teachers and students are highly motivated to make it work.

The best evidence for (1) is the way that phonics got taken out of reading education and is making a comeback. Throwing it out appears to have been a very misguided idea that came from the education establishment.

The best evidence for (2) is the fact that mastery learning has stayed within a narrow niche of schools. As an economist, I subscribe to the view that there are not $20 bills lying on the sidewalk waiting for people to pick them up. If mastery learning is that proverbial $20 bill, then those not picking it up include not just union-dominated public school districts but fancy private schools, charters, and home schoolers.

Long-time readers know that I believe what I call The Null Hypothesis. That is, very few education interventions can be proven to work by using a controlled experiment. Of those, very have effects that do not “fade out” with time. Of those, very few can be replicated outside of the original setting.

One implication of the Null Hypothesis is that higher spending per student will have no effect. I challenge anyone to find evidence against that implication using data on schools in America.¹

The MA authors and Austin Scholar really believe that the Null Hypothesis can be defeated. One can only hope that they prove correct.

substacks referenced above: @

Austin Scholar #177: The Alpha App Stack

1. Note that better education outcomes for children of affluent parents does not count. That could be—and probably is—due to factors that have nothing to do with schools.