For many reasons, Benjamin Bloom keeps popping into my head and into my conversations with educators. We regularly discuss the difference between Bloom’s Cognitive Taxonomy and Webb’s Depth of Knowledge. We use Bloom’s for lesson and environmental development and we use Webb’s for an assessment of the learning. All this reflection and discourse around learning has made me go back into the archives of my brain and revisit Bloom’s ideas on Mastery Learning.
The features that characterize Ben Bloom’s scholarship are several. First of all, he was interested in understanding the ways in which cognition functions and, more important, how high-level forms of thinking can be promoted. Secondly, he had an abiding faith in the power of the environment to influence the performance of individuals. He certainly was not a genetically oriented determinist. His convictions about environmental influences led, ultimately, to the impact that his work had in establishing the Head Start Program in the United States. He was invited to testify to the Congress of the United States about the importance of the first four years of the child’s life as the critical time to promote cognitive development. His testimony had an impact that has lasted decades. Thirdly, Bloom believed that not only was the environment important but also that it was possible to arrange systematically the ways in which learning could be promoted. It was these foundations of his scholarship that gave birth to the oddly controversial idea of Mastery Learning.
Mastery Learning, rooted initially in the work of John Carroll, is a good example of Bloom’s effort and his abiding faith in the power of rationally defined goals to promote the attainment of those goals through instruction. For at least a century, the way to approach the measurement and description of students’ academic achievement had been to expect a normal distribution and then to compare students’ performance. The assumption was that there would always be a normal distribution among students and that this distribution and the students’ location within it should determine their rewards— rewards distributed in the form of grades. Some students perform and get A’s and B’s, most get C’s, and some get D’s and F’s. That is the way it was- a normal distribution. A fixed mindset.
Bloom looked at the matter differently. Under the influence of Ralph Tyler, he recognized that what was important in education was not that students should be compared, but that they should be helped to achieve the goals of the standards they were studying. Goal attainment rather than student comparison was what was important. The process of teaching needed to be geared towards the design of tasks that would progressively and ultimately lead to the realization of the objectives that defined the objectives in the standards. Mastery learning is a tribute to such a conception. In current educational circles, he would be identified with a growth mindset.
The variable that needed to be addressed, as Bloom saw it, was TIME. It made no pedagogical sense to expect all students to take the same amount of time to achieve the same objectives. There were individual differences among students, and the important thing was to accommodate those differences via instructional differentiation and the environment in order to promote learning rather than to hold time constant and to expect some students to fail. Education was not a race. In addition, students were allowed, indeed encouraged, to help one other. Feedback and correction were immediate. Opportunities for reasoning and critique were essential. What Bloom was doing was applying in a very rational way the basic assumptions embraced by those who believe the educational process should be geared towards the realization of educational objectives. He believed that such an approach to curriculum, instruction, and assessment would enable virtually all youngsters to achieve success in school. The problem lay in curriculum design and in the forms of teaching that was appropriate to promoting the realization of the goals.
The educational world lost Benjamin Bloom almost 20 years ago, but his research, efforts, and legacy live on in head, hearts, and hands of many. Cheers, Ben. Thanks for the vision.
