Lessons Learned Using Mastery Learning in a Junior Level Engineering Course

The concept of mastery learning has been around in public schools since the 1920s (but did not gain any popularity until the 1960s).The idea behind Mastery learning is to make sure all students achieve 'mastery' of the course material by the end of the course rather than being solely concerned about assigning an A-F grade on all assignments.The driving force behind a mastery learning system is the concept that it doesn't matter when a student achieves mastery of the material, only that the student eventually does.The concept is akin to the clich 'Practice Makes Perfect' in that students can keep studying/practicing the material until they master it.The authors of this paper implemented a Mastery learning scheme in their Embedded Systems Coursea course offered to Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering junior and senior university students.The concept of mastery learning was well received by both faculty and students alike, however, its implementation was not.We found that many students took advantage of the system to engineer their educational experience in the class to do as little as possible.This paper describes our implementation of Mastery learning and how it played out in our courses.It is our hope that this paper will give others ideas of how to learn from our mistakes so that other implementations of mastery learning schemes may be more successful.