Bloom: Learning for Mastery

I am a fan of Bloom and have found his taxonomy to be very helpful in devising education that reaches a range of cognitive domains. In my previous study of bloom, I never realized how much behaviorist theory was involved in his ideas. I enjoyed this article because it took me away from the Bloom that is force fed to every education student across the US. I must say that the introduction of the article left me with more questions than answers and I got a bit confused with what he describes as the 1/3 idea within the educational system. I think he is making reference to what now is the outdated evaluative practice of the bell curve. Even with the confusion, I found the underlining ideas related to mastery of learning very interesting and well worth evaluation and personal reflection. It is amazing that even though this article was written in the 1960’s, its content is still so pertinent to modern education. Bloom is quite a visionary and makes reference to concepts like continual learning, tracking, audio visual methods and what I think is the idea that will later be coined by Howard Gardner as multiple intelligences (Gardner, 1983).

In modern education we are still looking for a means to educate all students, and since the establishment of NCLB we have become more conscious of the fact that students are different and they learn differently. Bloom recognizes this idea of differences and explains that we must take the differences into account so that we can create learning environments which will allow for mastery for all students. In this article, he considers one approach to learning for mastery and describes a five-step approach: 1) aptitude for particular kinds of learning; 2) quality of instruction; 3) ability to understand instruction; 4) perseverance; and 5) time allowed for learning. Although I will not go into each of these, I will say that the cumulative effect is that educators need to develop better means of evaluation in order to assess learners’ mastery, needs and preferences in order to create strategies, methods and materials that will foster success. This is no easy thing and Bloom recognizes it as a major change for learners, teachers and administrators. The modern relevancy again comes into play, and we must consider if the methods, strategies and materials associated with further inclusion of technologies could help the fulfillment and process of change to creating environments which take advantage of the five steps.

Could instructional methods and evaluative tools incorporated with technologies be the vehicle to mastery learning?



References:

Bloom, B.S. (1968, May). Learning for mastery. Evaluation Comment, 1(2), 1-12.

Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York:
Basic Books.