The Story of Building a House…
What if grades were used for building a house?
So you get the contractor in, and you say, “You have a total of three weeks to build a foundation, do what you can.”
So he does what he can. Maybe there are delays. Maybe some of the supplies don’t show up on time. Maybe some of the workers fall sick.
And then, three weeks later, the inspector comes in and says, “Well, the concrete’s still wet over there. That part’s not quite up to code. I’ll give it an 80 percent.” Oh, great. That’s a C.
Let’s build the first floor. Same process. We have two weeks. Do what we can, and we get 90 percent. “Great, that’s a B.”
Let’s build the second floor, third floor. Then all of a sudden, when you get to the fourth floor, the whole thing collapses.
What’s often the reaction in education is to say, “Oh, we had a bad contractor, or we needed more inspection.”
In the classroom, we cannot allow students to move to the next level if they haven’t mastered the previous one. Just like the house…it won’t hold up.
The problem in a traditional classroom is: time is the constant and learning is variable.
Benjamin Bloom said many years ago,
“The normal curve is a distribution most appropriate to chance and random activity. Education is a purposeful activity and we seek to have students learn what we would teach. Therefore, if we are effective, the distribution of grades will be anything but a normal curve. In fact, a normal curve is evidence of our failure to teach” (Bloom, 1968, p. 2).
Think about that for a moment…
…”the normal curve is a distribution most appropriate to chance and random activity” (Bloom, 1968, p. 2). But, teaching is a purposeful activity. Therefore, the distribution of grades should not be normal.
As educators we need to flip the idea that time is a constant and learning is the variable, to…
…learning is the constant and time is the variable. If we push mastery learning to front, no matter how long it takes students, we can skew the distribution of grades favorably.
With an effect size of 0.67, mastery learning has the potential to considerably accelerate student achievement. This means a student at the 50th percentile will increase 25 points to the 75th percentile if mastery learning is employed. Put another way, mastery learning has the Potential to considerably accelerate student achievement, increasing a student’s chances of success by 93% and placing them in the top 75% of their peers.
Let’s stop looking at the teaching and start focusing on the impact on learning.
References
Bloom, B. S. (1968). Learning for mastery. Evaluation Comment (UCLA-CSIEP), 1(2), 1-12.
Categories: Grades, Teacher Clarity, Teaching and Learning