The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of two adult basic reading programs, Direct Instruction Corrective Reading Decoding and Laubach Literacy, on the reading achievement of incarcerated male adults (n = 27) in an Alabama prison. Participants were tutors and students taking part in a reading tutoring program at the facility. The…

In this article, the authors investigated the teacher practices that middle school students attend to when appraising their classroom's mastery goal structure. After students rated each item on the mastery goal structure scale, they wrote what their teacher did or said that led them to make that choice. Students' responses to the open-ended…

On Monday, the teacher assigns her class a list of 20 spelling words to learn. On Friday, she tests the students on how well they learned to spell these words. This "mastery measurement" is the traditional way of determining student progress. The next spelling mastery test will indicate mastery of the next week's 20 new words, a new skill.…

This study evaluated the ability of the kindergarten and first grade Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), measures of early literacy development, to discriminate among low average, average, and above average students considered at risk emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) on the Total Reading cluster of the Woodcock…

This paper derives optimal rules for sequential mastery tests. In a sequential mastery test, the decision is to classify a subject as a master or a nonmaster or to continue sampling and administering another random item. The framework of minimax sequential decision theory (minimum information approach) is used; that is, optimal rules are obtained…

Background: Childhood obesity is a major public health threat. Increased fitness may have a positive influence on cognitive performance in both adults and children. Purpose: To examine which aspects of children's fitness assessment are associated with their performance on four different academic areas. Methods: FITNESSGRAM measures aerobic…

This 136-item annotated bibliography on mastery learning and mastery testing is the result of a computer search of the ERIC data base in February 1977. All entries are listed alphabetically by author. An abstract or annotation is provided for each entry. A subject index is included reflecting the major emphasis of each citation. (RC)

This dissertation investigated three instructional strategies in developmental math classes to determine if instructional strategy had a positive effect on student achievement, attitude towards mathematics, and anxiety level towards mathematics at a college in western Pennsylvania for students majoring in applied arts. The significance of this…

Current methods for obtaining reliability indices for mastery tests can be laborious. This paper offers practitioners tables from which agreement and kappa coefficients can be read directly and provides criterion for acceptable values of agreement and kappa coefficients. (TJH)

The purpose of this paper is to derive optimal rules for sequential mastery tests. In a sequential mastery test, the decision is to classify a subject as a master or a nonmaster, or to continue sampling and administering another random test item. The framework of minimax sequential decision theory (minimum information approach) is used; that is,…

Formulates optimal sequential rules for mastery testing using an approach derived from Bayesian sequential decision theory to consider both threshold and linear loss structures. Adopts the binomial probability distribution as the psychometric model. Provides an empirical example for concept-learning in medicine. (SLD)

When students are taught to mastery, they become smarter, acquire information faster, and develop efficient strategies for learning. Teachers must have an understanding of what mastery is and how to achieve it in their students. However, teachers cannot teach to mastery without referencing the performance of their students. In addition, teachers…

A new direct and short proof is offered for the monotone likelihood ratio for the sum of independent Bernoulli random variables through use of an inequality by Marcus and Lopes (1957) on elementary symmetric functions. (SLD)

In this paper, we apply sequential one-sided confidence interval estimation procedures with beta-protection to adaptive mastery testing. The procedures of fixed-width and fixed proportional accuracy confidence interval estimation can be viewed as extensions of one-sided confidence interval procedures. It can be shown that the adaptive mastery…

A simulation study of a sequential computerized mastery test is carried out with items modeled with the 3 parameter logistic item response theory model. The examinees' responses are either identically distributed, not identically distributed, or not identically distributed together with estimation errors in the item characteristics. The…