Mastery Learning

Technically, Assessment and Evaluation encompasses any activity intended to monitor student learning. It can be planned or spontaneous; it can be focused on an individual or on an educational system; it can be systematic or haphazard. More concisely, Assessment and Evaluation tend to be uncritical consequences of other discourses on learning.

“Learning as acquisition” – the Acquisition Metaphor – is probably the most commonly invoked learning metaphor in English. It is evident in such phrases as “grasping the point,” “taking things in,” “getting it,” “picking things up,” “hard to swallow,” “remember this stuff,” and “cramming for the test.” It is not theoretically sophisticated, relying on the assumption that knowledge comprises externalized objects, and asserting that learning is a process of moving those objects from the outside to the inside.

The Attainment Metaphor is prominent in current discussions of formal education. It frames knowledge as existing in discrete regions (e.g., fields, areas) to be traversed, and learning is typically framed as progressing across (and sometimes dwelling in) those regions. Learning is cast in movement-based sensibilities –e.g., as “getting there.”

Mentalisms reach across any theory that (1) assumes a separation of mental from physical (inner from outer, subjective from objective, etc.) and (2) casts learning in terms of mental images, models, encodings, or other inner representations of the existing world. Some sort of barrier – typically the body, or fallible senses, or faulty subjective interpretations – is seen to prevent direct, first-hand knowledge of reality.