Second, mastery learning structured its curriculum not in terms of time, but in terms of certain target levels of comprehension and achievement. This turned tradition quietly but entirely upside down. In the traditional model, a certain amount of class time is devoted to a particular topic or concept; when the allotted interval is finished, the entire class moves on, in spite of the fact that individual students will have achieved widely varying degrees of mastery over the material. In Washburne’s system, by contrast, students, with the help of self-paced exercises, proceed at varying rates
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