Mastery Learning

Mastery learning was originally developed by Morrison in the 1930s. His formula for mastery was "Pretest, teach, test the result, adapt procedure, teach and test again to the point of actual learning." (Morrison, 1931, in Saettler, 1990). Mastery learning assumes that all students can master the materials presented in the lesson. Bloom further developed Morrison's plan, but mastery learning is more effective for the lower levels of learning on Bloom's taxonomy, and not appropriate for higher level learning (Saettler, 1990).