Editor’s Note: Professor Patricia Cerrito has been teaching for 30 years, the last 20 in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Louisville.
A new survey shows that a disturbingly large number of American college students believe that they’re entitled to good grades as long as they attended class and did the assigned readings. Here’s the problem: grading on the supposed level of effort is a recipe for mediocrity at best.
I propose instead that assessment of students should be based on mastery learning. That isn’t some new educational fad. It simply means that grades are earned on how well a student masters the material, not on his or her level of effort.
Yes, that’s an old-fashioned concept, but nevertheless a good one.
Mastery learning requires that students demonstrate a thorough knowledge of the course material before moving on to new material. This approach increases student engagement and improves results. Students who want an A or B must earn it through performance; it is not automatic. What I have found is that most students, when told clearly that performance is the only thing that matters, drop the entitlement mentality and rise to the challenge of mastering the subject.
In the fall, 2008 semester, I taught College Algebra and an Introduction to Data Analysis course. In both classes, I introduced mastery requirements. Students who turned in shoddy work just had to redo it. This requires more time and effort on my part because I see the student work multiple times instead of just seeing it once. However, the improved results make the extra work worthwhile.
For College Algebra, all the exams were pass/fail, but passing required a score of at least 80 percent. There were 8 tests in the 15-week semester, and students had many opportunities to take tests on older material. Students received their final grade based on the portion of the material that was mastered.
Students were also required to complete a homework set each week to keep them focused on the subject matter.
Many of the students were determined to achieve an A grade; some took tests on the same material as many as 5 times before passing. Mastery didn’t always come easily, but most students were willing to work hard to achieve it. They came to the tutoring lab more often and devoted more time to the homework sets.
It is my belief that students need to learn statistics by doing statistics and then by writing up their results. So in the data analysis course, students had to perform a research project. They used statistical software for calculations and real data from a national healthcare database. The data were sufficiently messy so that considerable preprocessing was needed, creating a very real world laboratory. Each assignment was returned for improvement and resubmission until it was complete and correct.
At the end of the semester, students had a substantial, written research study. There were no tests in the course; students were assessed by their writing. They were evaluated on statistical content, grammar, and syntax.
The results were quite astonishing. In that course, four students dropped early because they were unwilling to commit to the workload requirements. The remaining students completed all course material to my threshold level of acceptance and received their well earned A grades. The research projects were later combined into a book and submitted to a publisher. The manuscript was accepted and I am now doing final editing prior to publication. (The book has a tentative title of A Casebook on Pediatric Diseases.)
Students also submitted their work to a professional conference on health outcomes research. A total of 11 were accepted for poster presentations. Such external review validates the quality of the student work given the mastery requirement.
In College Algebra, only 16 students out of 150 withdrew and 35 percent achieved the grade of A, which required mastery of all course material. Typically, only 5 percent of the students enrolled in College Algebra achieve a grade of A. In the past, the combined withdrawal rate plus the rate of failure usually ranged from 35-50 percent in the course, but with mastery learning, my failure plus withdrawal rate was under 20 percent
Students are enrolled in College Algebra to complete a degree requirement. Almost none of the students actually wants to be in the class. Not all of them appreciated the mastery concept. A few believed that they could not achieve the 80 percent threshold at any point and let me know that they thought I was grading this way just to set them up to fail. Fortunately, it was just a small minority who appeared unwilling to work within the framework I set up, and who wanted a passing grade regardless of effort. Most were willing to try, and most rose to the challenge.
I will make changes in these courses, but the mastery learning requirement will continue. The pass rate in College Algebra will be moved to 85 percent and homework requirements will increase. To keep the material fresh and interesting in data analysis, I will change the dataset and the course emphasis. It may be possible to submit a book each semester containing the students’ final projects.
I am very encouraged by the results of my mastery requirement because I’m confident that my students are learning. They’re learning algebra and statistics and they’re also learning that good grades aren’t entitlements. They must be earned.