‍THOUGHT: The 75% Foundation
TREND: Stop Measuring Teaching, Start Measuring Learning
TOOL: Tools for Mastery-Based Learning at Home

The 75% Foundation

We don't build houses with 75% foundations. We don't fly planes with 75% safety checks. Sal Khan of Khan Academy fame wonders why we advance students with 75% understanding:

"Imagine if we built homes that way. You have two weeks. Do what you can. Inspector shows up, it's 75% complete. Great! That's a C+. Start the second floor, then the third floor.”

What happens? The whole structure collapses.

Even for "A students," a 90% on a test may seem to indicate mastery. But what if they missed every question on one topic?

Watch the clip

Stop Measuring Teaching, Start Measuring Learning

Scott Ellis, founder of MasteryTrack, has a slogan:

"Stop measuring teaching. Start measuring learning."

And thanks to new data infrastructure, schools can now build dashboards  that show where students actually are—not where the calendar says they should be. But when schools implement mastery tracking, teachers often discover uncomfortable truths.

"[They're] always horrified to learn that they have been wasting time," Ellis says in an interview with Rick Hess.

Students who passed tests are revealed to have critical missing foundations. But they can't get support "because the class needs to move on." 

Data alone is not enough for mastery-based grading to take hold.

Read the full interview

Tools for Mastery-Based Learning

While MasteryTrack provides data dashboards for classrooms, there are a number of home-based curricula offering mastery tracking:

• Khan Academy - Free adaptive practice that ensures mastery before advancement. Works beautifully alongside MasteryTrack for math and science concepts.
• IXL Learning - Practice modules with a SmartScore system requiring consistent correct answers. A score of 100 represents complete mastery.
• Math-U-See - Mastery-based math curriculum perfect for parents who aren't math experts. Each concept is fully mastered before moving forward.
• Beast Academy - Comic-based math for grades 2-5 that emphasizes deep conceptual understanding over memorization.
• ALEKS - AI-driven math system that creates personalized knowledge maps, determining exactly what a student knows and is ready to learn next.

Tweet of The Day

When the calendar controls learning instead of competency, boredom is a predictable result.