 Hi, my name is Tracy Takahama-Spinoza, and this is a video to explain the differences between standard-based education, competency-based learning, and mastery learning. Standard-based education came into play in the 80s, and competency-based came into play more or less at the very end of the 90s and the 2000s. And mastery learning is the oldest, and we're returning to this. It comes in from the 1968 version of Benjamin Bloom's concepts. And so if you think about the comparison here, the main factor differentiating each of these has to do with time. So to explain this, we need to get a little bit of vocabulary under our belts. First of all, backward design. When we talk about understanding by design or backwards design, we think of educational planning or the way we design our classes or each lesson plan in three stages, right? The first is to understand our objectives. What is it that we hope to achieve at the end of the day, right? How will we evaluate that? What are we going to accept as indicators of success? And then what are the activities and resources that we might incorporate in order to get that evidence that will show us how far or how close we are to meeting the objective? So within these three different steps here, we have to also then disaggregate objectives into knowledge, skills, and attitudes. There is nothing that you teach or anybody learns that is not a piece of knowledge, skills, and or an attitude. So if you break that down, this is where the word competencies comes into play. The OACD used this in 1997 to explain that the combination of knowledge, skills, and attitudes are what makes up learning outcomes. So if we return to Benjamin Bloom for just a second, 1968, his main idea here was that there was at least five different things that came into play to reach mastery. So the first thing has to do with an aptitude is basically the amount of time required by the learner to get something under his belt. So maybe he walks into the classroom with a whole lot of natural aptitude for something, right? The second thing has to do with the quality of the instructor. We know that a great teacher can leapfrog student learning maybe one to two years within a single year of instruction just because that teacher is so good, right? The third then has to do with the ability to understand the instructions. So has that student got that prerequisite understanding, that knowledge to be able to scaffold prior knowledge and to reach this new level of understanding that's being offered to him? The fourth point has to do with attitude, perseverance. Can that student stick with the fifth point, the amount of time that it might take to learn? And according to Bloom, this is really the key to mastery is giving each kid enough time to be able to fill in those gaps of prerequisite knowledge that they might not have come into the class with naturally or from prior experience. So we keep all of those definitions in mind. It reminds us of Todd Rose's idea of the end of average, right? This is kind of making fun of the bell curve that we have. And when we think about standard spaced education, we want everybody to reach the average. Well, that means, you know, what 68% of the people naturally do, right? But we've got a lot of people on both ends of the spectrum, some that are a little bit slower or that need a little bit extra help because they don't have the prerequisite knowledge. And on the other end of the scale, those kids who are definitely gifted and higher fliers, they're not being attended to when we only shoot for average. So if we look at it from this perspective of learning difficulties, why did Bloom believe that 90% of the kids in any given classroom would be able to achieve? Well, basically if you look at learning difficulties around the world in the United States, it's 13.7, but that's because in some states you're actually given extra money when you have kids with needs. So these are higher proportion of kids with special needs in some states than in others, which is kind of crazy because it should be standard all across the board, right? In Europe, it's on the other extreme, it's very low. Only about 4.53% of kids have special needs. And so the worldwide average, if you lay this out, Science Daily says it's basically 10% of the world has a problem that would prevent them from learning any specific grade level knowledge within a reasonable amount of time. So this sort of justifies Bloom's concept that at least 90% of the kids in your class should be able to master all of the concepts that are being taught if and when they have the amount of time they need. So what does this mean? Standards-based education is literally based on what you can test on a standardized test, which is only knowledge and skills. Whereas competencies-based learning is a bit better because it's looking at knowledge skills and attitudes. This is wonderful, right? And they use a greater variety of tools than we have since the 80s, right? We use other types of things. Qualitative measures are valued. Rubrics are valued. But when we get to mastery learning, that's stepping back into the past to really launch us into this future thinking of knowledge skills and attitudes which are evaluated with a lot of different types of tools. But the key factor here is that time becomes a variable. It's not a limitation. So the key idea in mastery learning is that each kid has to master at least 90% of the content before he goes on to the next level. This means that you're not just going to keep social promotion and letting that kid go to second grade. If he doesn't master the concepts of no addition, how is he going to learn to do subtraction? So you have to have him master at least 90% of those basic concepts. So we have these two 1990s, right? 90% of the kids can get it if they get at least 90% of the information, the competencies, before they move on to the next level. So hopefully that's a clarification there between standard space learning, competencies based education and mastery learning, which I hope that we're returning to with this new thinking. So if you have any questions about that, please don't hesitate to write me. I would love to continue this conversation. Thanks a lot.