To reduce academic dishonesty and strengthen learning outcomes, I adopted in-depth oral examinations as my benchmark and summative assessments in a Human Anatomy & Physiology course taught in an online asynchronous setting. This decision led my students and me down the transformative path of mastery learning. This was a "threshold…

Achievement goals are the reasons for pursuing competence-related tasks. Much prior work has shown that they can affect student motivation, learning, and performance outcomes. They are typically measured in classroom settings vis-à-vis self-report surveys about students' goals or the perceived goal structure of the class. Less work has measured…

Learning progression research has the capability to connect thinking in the education sciences and geography. Learning progressions provide a map of the various pathways that students take to master a topic. The aim of this paper is to illustrate significant conceptual ties between learning progressions and disciplinary geography. Two construct…

What if all students had an opportunity to work through content at their own pace? What if all students had to master content before they moved on? The authors take their flipped-classroom model to the next level by flipping their classroom for mastery. In the flipped-mastery model, the teacher begins by organizing content around specific…

Schools are frequently inundated with demands to implement new instructional interventions and teaching methods that are not yet backed up by a solid body of research. Fortunately, many of these innovations include elements of more established strategies for which evidence of positive effects does exist. Guskey describes the core elements of one…

Student writing can provide opportunities for reflection on concept mastery for both students and teacher, and the creation of a biology portfolio by each student can allow a teacher to assess the level of understanding achieved by each individual as well as timely correction of conceptual errors. The use of portfolio is an assessment tool, which…