Our Approach to Mastery Learning for Students

MasteryTrack provides a simple mastery-based dashboard to display student learning progress, enabling students to learn and teachers to teach using any system they want. Its structure makes it extremely quick to set up, intuitive to understand, and easy to use. This is the core innovation of MasteryTrack.

Start by checking the Course Overview

The teacher can immediately see how much progress students have made:

who has mastered learning objectives (green)
who has not mastered objectives and needs support (purple)
who is ready to attempt to demonstrate mastery (blue)
who has not yet learned a concept (gray)

See more detail with the Classroom Objective Dashboard

This is the teacher’s primary dashboard—teachers can instantaneously see the learning progress for every student for each objective, and use this information to decide how best to meet the individual learning needs of each student.

who has mastered learning objectives (green)
who has not mastered objectives and needs support (purple)
who is ready to attempt to demonstrate mastery (blue)
who has not yet learned a concept (gray)

Check the list of learning objectives

The teacher can quickly see the list of learning objectives, and preview each assessment or assign assessments to several students at once.

Review the results of a student’s automated assessment

Once students have completed assessments the teacher can instantly see the results—no grading required! MasteryTrack has automated grading for K-5 math as well as Mandarin Chinese. Patterns in student performance can clearly be seen and learning challenges easily diagnosed so the teacher can determine the next step in the learning process.

Find aligned learning resources in the Learning Center

When a student is ready to learn or practice a specific skill, he can look in the Learning Center to find links to resources directly aligned with each learning objective. No need for teachers to search for resources online, MasteryTrack comes with them all pre-loaded.

Print a mastery-based report card for parents

Mastery-based report cards can be generated easily in MasteryTrack. They can be used in parent-teacher conferences or sent home with students at the end of the quarter, and are available in color as well as black-and-white for easy printing.

A mastery learning system for the classroom

In today’s blended learning classrooms, teachers and students use a wide range of educational software and learning systems. Companies will keep inventing newer and better ones. As educators across the country are starting to explore mastery-based learning, they are asking a common question: "How do I integrate the data from all these different learning systems so I can get a clear picture of where my student is in her learning?"

MasteryTrack addresses this fundamental challenge by offering a standalone system whose only purpose is to consolidate, organize, and display data about student learning progress. Even if teachers and students use multiple or changing learning systems, student learning objectives and mastery thresholds don’t change very much. Since MasteryTrack provides these and stores the data about student learning progress, teachers and students can change learning systems any time because the mastery data is stored in a standalone system.

What is mastery learning? Key concepts

MasteryTrack is a simple system. However, it depends on a few key concepts:

Mastery is binary.

Is the student ready to move forward in their learning? This is the key question every teacher must answer in a mastery-based system. This decision is binary: either the student is ready to move forward or not. While MasteryTrack enables teachers to show students making progress towards mastery (by marking students as “not mastered” or “near mastered”), there is only one level of mastery: either the student is ready to move on to the next learning objective, or else she needs to keep working on the current one.

Learning objectives must be specific, discrete, and demonstrable.

Many learning objectives and standards used across the country do not enable mastery-based learning because they are complex, vague, or combine several skills. Teachers cannot easily determine whether students have mastered these objectives, and this prevents mastery-based learning from happening. The learning objectives used in MasteryTrack are specific, discrete, and demonstrable, so teachers and students (and also parents!) know exactly what skill or content knowledge the student is trying to master.

Mastery thresholds must be clearly defined.

What does “mastery” mean? This is a critical question! For every learning objective teachers must know what the student must do to demonstrate he has mastered the skill or concept and is ready to move on in his learning. This is often easier in subjects like elementary math and more complex in subjects like English or social studies. But it is critical for all subjects. MasteryTrack includes mastery thresholds for courses in which it has developed automated assessments (K-5 math and Mandarin Chinese).