QSI Mastery Learning in High School

[coughingfurballs]

For those of you have experienced QSI's Mastery Learning at the High School level, what are your impressions? Does it work?

[PsyGuy]

The Mastery process is essentially repeat until students meet the target criterion. It has two major and serious flaws. 1) It encourages memory and recall of correct responses (learn the answer not how to get the answer). 2) It suffers heavily from regression towards the mean.
Aside from curriculum validity and workability it creates a greatly increased burden on the IT, who must constantly reinvent reteach strategies and lessons, as well as the marking and assessment of repeated attempts, such that at a certain point in the growing work flow an IT is motivated to declare the student successful, simply to reduce the workload. Its much like mastery programs in western education policy, where a student can have no grade lower than a 'C'/satisfactory/3/etc.. at a certain point its just easier to say and record the cut off score required to move on.

Does it work, that depends how you define work. If you adapt the paradigm early, you deliver lessons with a lower criterion of success (you make them easier) too assure a higher percentage of students performance measures meet that criterion. From that perspective, sure it works, thats what it says in the grade book. Easy lesson, most students do well, students are happy, parents are happy, leadership is happy.
Does it have externally valid 'rigor' compared to other meds/peds, no.

[koda]

It depends on how you view this. If you look at it the way the other poster does that mastery learning means lower standards, then he is correct. However, I've taught using mastery learning with QSI as well as with other schools because I actually believe that every student can achieve the standard of mastery and some students can move beyond that to higher level skills within the concept. I have taught English, History, and MS math through Algebra I and have had very little problems getting my students to do high level work. It's important that you start where the student is at and then work to the level you want them to be. Does it mean you invest more time and effort into each student, absolutely. But the great thing about QSI versus other schools that it's easier to do this as class sizes are very small - so you can differentiate between students. I have not once lowered what constituted as "mastery" --> it's very clearly spelled out. You can look online at their website under curriculum to see what constitutes mastery. Their curriculum is aligned with the common core in the US in math and english. In history and science its very similar to their American counterparts. After all, QSI are American curriculum schools. They just won't accept grades of D's and F's and even C. Because if there is only a C level of understanding of a concept, they haven't really mastered it and it will come back to cause problems in later classes. I however do share the philosophy of QSI and I don't mind the extra work it takes to make sure that all of my students are successful. I have run into teachers who think that it means lower the standards, and it just infuriates me. If you don't believe in the mission of QSI whole-heartedly, then they definitely aren't the schools for you.

[PsyGuy]

@koda

This still leaves unaddressed the regression error and the issue psychometric navigation.

CC are junk standards, an IS with a rigorous curriculum exceeds CC standards. Maths and ELAR are the only subject fields you can align to CC, as that is all CC addresses, NexGen is not an official or formal part of CC standards. Regardless there is no SS/humanities, PHE, Fine/Performing arts, ICT, standards. CC isnt a curriculum is a curriculum fragment.

There is no such construct or model for "American curriculum schools" within a regulatory context. CC is a suggestion, no State MUST align with CC standards, the USDOE is specifically barred by USC from creating a NC. The accepted AS curriculum in IE is AP/PreAP.

A "C" and mastery depends on the criterion score for that mark of "C", the assumption is its somewhere around the 70th percentile, but that can be arbitrarily and operationally defined to any criterion score, and thats all the mastery frame work has done is raised the cut score for satisfactory and renamed it mastery.
Strongly concur that if you cant drink the koolaid or fake, it will very likely result in a poor institutional 'fit'.

[coughingfurballs]

Thanks for the info! (I decided not to go with QSI...).