The construction of web-based mastery learning system

Abstract

For the learning of consecutive courses, student's learning outcome may be affected by learning performance of previous course. In other words, if student does not learn something well, say integer addition in mathematics education, then poor learning performance of following consecutive course, say integer multiplication can be expected. Bloom advocated concept of mastery learning in 1960s [1]. Bloom claimed that giving sufficient learning time and good lecturing quality, almost every student learns everything taught by teacher well. In this manner, if student gets mastery at every learning unit, then it may solve problem stated above. The very important part of mastery learning is remedial learning. In remedial learning, teaching content will be tailored to meet each individual student's need. It will put a lot of burden on teacher if students who need remedial learning are not a few. In this paper, a web-based mastery learning system is introduced to make mastery learning process more practical and more effective. An experimental study has been done on an Institute of Technology in Taiwan. The result showed students appreciated this system, and almost all students got mastery based on predefined criteria.