If you are following the script on Mastery Learning, one of the key principles is that if a student doesn’t master the material, they need to re-test until they achieve mastery. One of the biggest challenges of Mastery Learning is that you have to give students multiple opportunities to master the curriculum. If they don’t demonstrate mastery on your first assessment, you need to provide a new assessment that tests the same material. Logistically, this is a huge challenge for teachers. How many versions of the summative assessment can they create? And what about the amount of grading required? Yikes!

This article is part of a series where we will discuss how you can make mastery learning a reality. In this series, I am sharing how I, and thousands of other teachers, have transformed classrooms into a place where every student succeeds. In my previous articles, I gave an overview of Mastery Learning, then we learned that you don’t have to lecture to the whole class at the same time ever again, how to create a flexible pace for other students, Extreme Differentiation that Doesn’t Drive You Crazy, Purposeful Teacher-Student Interactions Every Day – Really!, and How Mastery Creates a Culture of Collaboration in Your Class. If you haven’t yet read the other articles, I encourage you to go back so you can see the progression of how to do Mastery Learning well.

Using Software to Create Thousands of Versions of a Summative Assessment

Back to solving the summative assessment conundrum. The good news is that software has solved this problem. For me, my go-to assessments are generated via our learning management system. Our school has created banks of questions that assess each objective. When students sit down to take a summative assessment, they are randomly assigned questions from each major objective. I organize these questions in banks, and there are multiple questions that assess each objective. Students must then score a minimum percentage in order to demonstrate mastery. If students achieve mastery, then they are able to move on. If not, then they must retake a different assessment that pulls new questions from the same banks. 

What happens if students don’t “pass” the summative assessment? Should you allow them to start the next topic? That depends on your context and on what you teach. I usually allow students who have not passed to…