What is Mastery?

One approach that I have seen encouraged by some assessment recording systems is to place all the statements from a mastery curriculum onto a spreadsheet, and then track whether pupils have met them or not, usually with some kind of three part system – RAG rating or ‘emerging, expected, exceeding’ or similar. This is the worst of all systems! First, these statements will not give you helpful formative information. These curriculum statements are not designed to provide useful feedback either to pupils or teachers. As Dylan Wiliam has said, how useful is it to tell a student that ‘their scientific investigations need to be planned more systematically’? If they had known how to be more systematic, presumably they would have been so in the first place.

Second, these statements will not give you a shared summative meaning about the pupils’ performance, because they are capable of being interpreted in so many different ways. Take the statement ‘Pupils can compare fractions and identify which is larger’. That’s a fairly precise statement, but even so it is capable of being interpreted in many different ways. 90% of 14-year-olds will give you the right answer when asked to compare 1/7 and 5/7. But only 15% will when asked to compare 5/7 and 5/9. And if that is true of a fairly precise statement in an objective subject like maths, how much more true is it of statements like ‘can use vocabulary with originality and flair?’