Rereading Ben Bloom’s 1968 “Learning for Mastery” I am once again impressed and humbled by his ability to cut straight to the absolute core of the issue. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard these points made more clearly or more persuasively. Absolutely inspiring.
If students are normally distributed with respect to aptitude for some subject (mathematics, science, literature, history, etc.) and all the students are provided with the same instruction (same in terms of amount of instruction, quality of instruction, and time available for learning), the end result will be a normal distribution on an appropriate measure of achievement. Furthermore the relationship between aptitude and achievement will be relatively high…
Conversely, if the students are normally distributed with respect to aptitude, but the kind and quality of instruction and the amount of time available for learning are made appropriate to the characteristics and needs of each student, the majority of students may be expected to achieve mastery in the subject. And, the relationship between aptitude and achievement should approach zero…
Carroll’s (1963) view [is] that aptitude is the amount of time required by the learner to attain mastery of a learning task. Implicit in this formulation is the assumption that, given enough time, all students can conceivably attain mastery of a learning task. If Carroll is right, then learning mastery is theoretically available to all, if we can find the means for helping each student.