Mastery Learning - Reduce Variation

"...two central goals of mastery learning, particularly as explicated by Bloom (1976): To reduce the variation in student achievement and to reduce or eliminate any correlation between aptitude and achievement. Since all students must achieve at a high level on the subtraction objective but students who achieve the criterion early cannot go on to new material, there is a ceiling effect built in to the procedure which will inherently cause variation among students to be small and correspondingly reduce the correlation between mathematics aptitude and subtraction performance. In fact, if we set the mastery criterion at 100% and repeated the formative test-corrective instruction cycle until all students achieved this criterion, then the variance on the subtraction test would be zero, as would the correlation between aptitude and achievement"."

Source: "Mastery Learning Reconsidered", Robert E. Slavin, Center for Research on Elementary and Middle Schools, Johns Hopkins University, 1987, p. 5.
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