What is Total Mastery Learning?

What is "Total Mastery Learning"?

When the student is presented with a body-of-knowledge, he inevitably "acquires" some or all of that knowledge in his own way. Each student "learns" different parts of that body-of-knowledge to different degrees and "associates" the details differently with other knowledge he has already acquired. Human beings have an innate ability to disaggregate the details of a body-of-knowledge "on the fly" and reformulate it, re-aggregate it, before integrating it into memory--a woefully inadequate description of the amazing mental process we call "learning." The mechanisms of this process are still largely mysterious and so complex as to be substantially beyond the control of the teacher. A more scientific description of this process would be better left to a specialist in this field. Still, the casual observer can discern some manifestations of this process.

The more the information to be learned is sensibly "atomized", or disaggregated, into discrete, but logically coherent, units of knowledge, the more likely the student is to focus consciously on those details as he integrates them into his usable knowledge base. In focusing on these discrete units of knowledge, e.g., words, phrases, sentences, illustrations, numbers, rules-of-grammar, the student has the opportunity to consciously explore a number of different ways to associate those details with his existing body-of-knowledge. This "atomization" technique can be helpful to the teacher, as well, because it can assure the teacher that a given inventory of certain details has at least been offered to the student to be learned. NB: the presumption underlying all testing is that learning may have taken place if such details can be discovered in the student's immediate recall and long-term memory.

But, lest we rely too heavily on the certainty of learning, using this technique, let us remember that the student must still "associate" and integrate knowledge of these details in his "mind" before it has much chance of being "learned", i.e. available from memory for future use, not just as a known "fact', but as a ready tool for critical thinking and performance tasks, e.g., speaking, singing, drawing, calculating, etc.

Thus, the use of a teaching and testing tool such as an interactive online tutorials with immediate feedback for confirmation or correction of student responses can help students learn by disaggregating complex bodies of knowledge for easier comprehension and assimilation, i.e. learning. Teachers assemble an inventory of the individual elements of that body of knowledge for presentation and practice. Then they can "objectively" measure how many of those details have been learned. The teacher should be free to specify how much of that inventory must be acquired for satisfactory performance. Theoretically, the teacher can even insist on "total mastery."

Nor does the availability of objective testing preclude other, more "subjective" evaluation techniques which can be very valuable for measuring whether the student has integrated the essentials of a body-of knowledge into a smooth tapestry of understanding. This ScottNet^® MakeMeSmart^™tutorial program only presumes to offer the tools and mechanisms to help teachers and students accomplish these teaching and learning tasks.

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