MasteryConnect for Mastery Learning

What Is MasteryConnect?

MasteryConnect is a competency-based learning platform that teachers use to pinpoint levels of understanding, target students for intervention, and inform data driven instruction. Teachers can generate online assessments and customize student reports of progress towards mastery of standards. This program is embedded with common core and state standards but is adaptable to teachers adding their own questions. This tool can house formative assessments to be used with multiple classes over time.  Essentially, it gives teachers more time to teach and students more time to learn.

What Are Some Unique Features of MasteryConnect?

MasteryConnect is a simple yet sophisticated program that offers a variety of user friendly features. Targeted standards can be color coded by domain and sequenced by themes. Student grades can be entered as raw data from rubrics, bubble sheets, and performance tasks from GradeCam support. Student criteria for proficiency scores can be set at an accuracy rate that matches that teacher's expectations. Much like Pinterest, MasteryConnect has a user friendly interface that is used to search an assessment bank. Educators can download or modify existing peer reviewed assessments or create new assessments. Other features include:

• MasteryTracker - assess standards, monitor student performance, and report mastery 
• Common Assessment Creation and Sharing - make and share multiple choice, open-answer, rubrics, writing, and oral assessments 
• Resource Pins - pin and discover standards aligned resources 
• Learning Community - create professional learning networks 
• Grading Tools - disseminate formative and benchmark/interim assessments, and make grading automatic and fast. Scores appear in real-time in MasteryTracker. 
• Reports - compare and collaborate with common assessment data 
• Integration Tools - synchronize student information including subgroup data, demographics and mastery levels. Single-sign-ons make connecting MasteryConnect data to district and school information warehouses intuitive. 

MasteryConnect offers a plethora of resources including a user guide, training pack, videos, and a blog. 

What is the Cost of MasteryConnect?

It is a free resource that includes MasteryTracker, Common Core Assessment Sharing, resource pin option, and Socratic Instant Response. Users with the free version can scan up to ten questions using the MasteryScan GradeScan feature. Assessments that are generated in the free account are automatically shared with the community at large. Check out the complete price guide for more information.

For $249 a year, Premium Teacher Pro allows teachers to GradeScan up to 100 questions, export data, utilize collaborative tools and reporting, generate student and parent reports, and formulate curriculum maps. Schools and school districts can obtain MasteryConnect for $7 per student per year. Included in this subscription is benchmarking capabilities and assessment tools, progress reports, teacher and student management, and student information system (SIS) integration. Privacy controls are embedded in the paid subscription accounts along with ways to share assessments across a district or schools. Paid subscribers can upload copyrighted assessments into MasteryConnect for current and future use.

How Does MasteryConnect Work?
There are four ways that teachers can input student data into MasteryConnect:

• By entering raw student scores from formative assessments
• By entering MasteryConnect's GradeCam to take pictures of bubbled score sheets
• By uploading rubrics and determining mastery based on observations
• By assigning online assessments generated with MasteryConnect's online item bank of technology enhanced questions

MasteryConnect has a "Socrative", a real-time assessment feature, and "Mindful", which is a staff development tool for educators. In Socrative, teachers can check for student understanding through multiple choice, true/false, short answer, quiz game, and/or exit tickets. On a technology device, students respond to questions while teachers view a live results table that populates individual and group performance. Reports can be generated that show how students performed on standards taught and assessed. Teachers can create, save, and share assessments, as well as, review data from past quizzes. Data can be used to inform instruction for remediation and determine student skill groups. Intervention groups can continue until mastery is achieved. Below is an overview of how MasteryConnect works:

What Are the MasteryConnect Creative Uses and Ideas for School Leaders?

Teachers can use MasteryConnect to:

• search and pin standards-aligned resources for planning units of study.
• upload resources to their curriculum map.
• pin resources for student "playlists" to be stored on student's personal page.
• implement pre and post test quizzes for each unit of study.
• develop an item bank of academic language for each unit.
• conduct guided reading and math groups Monday through Thursday. Friday can be the assessment day to check for understanding. 
• generate common formative assessments in reading and math.
• set personal and individual goals for the class with parents during Open House.
• plan team time with intervention groups in Professional Learning Teams.
• plan next week's lesson based on student performance.
• maintain online grade books to display and track student growth over time.
• write individual student development plans.

Superintendents can use MasteryConnect to view district, school, teacher, and student data. These reports display total percentage of standards assessed, progress towards standards mastery, and information on individual assessments. Information gleaned from these reports can be used to write SMART goals for the district's strategic plan. Professional development could be designed to integrate MasteryConnect into daily teaching and learning.

Principals can use MasteryConnect to engage parents at back to school night. Data can be shared to show the grade levels' and school's growth from the previous year. This data can be used to set SMART goals for the school improvement plan and professional development plans for principals. Principals can also use data in Professional Learning Teams to evaluate common formative assessments and next steps. Professional development could be designed to integrate MasteryConnect into daily teaching. The video below shows how MasteryConnect can be in used in schools:

What Are Others Saying About MasteryConnect?

Dr. Rick DuFour weighed in by stating, "Thanks to MasteryConnect, educators can connect with colleagues throughout the nation to develop and share common assessments. Educators can now extend their professional learning communities beyond their schools. This ready access to expanded expertise is exactly what we have been hoping would become available to educators."

Teachers across the country praise MasteryConnect for the real-time data that is used to create fluid intervention groups. The BubbleScore app allows students to have instantaneous feedback as the students complete assignments. BubbleScore also conserves time for teachers by scoring the multiple choice tests immediately as soon as they are scanned. Educators feel empowered to remediate students as quickly as the student responses are scanned. MasteryConnect allows educators to complete in depth searches for specific resources based on the standards that the students need more practice to master. It provides collaboration for teachers to share with other teachers across the country.

Parents enjoy easier access to not just the grades but the actual assessments. This transparency keeps an open line of communication between the teacher and the parents. To help their children, parents like that the individual student reports reflect the standards mastered and the standards that students still need to learn.

Principals appreciate the versatility of MasteryConnect as students can access the assessments on the iPad, laptop, desktop computer, or paper bubble sheets. Paper copies of bubble sheets can be scanned as soon as they are held in front of the computer's camera. Administrators like that teachers can always have their pulse on the instructional needs of the students as MasteryConnect color codes data sheets by standards after each assessment. MasteryConnect checks for student understanding while practicing the EOG format that schools are compared on. Below is a personal story about the difference that MasteryConnect made in a school:

Personal Reflection and Analysis of MasteryConnect

The Wake County Public School System uses Understanding By Design (UBD) for lesson planning. Being able to begin lesson planning with the end assessment in mind is a distinct advantage of MasteryConnect as teachers can search grade level standards before designing units of study and assessments. MasteryConnect is an ideal companion application as it can travel with teachers wherever they go since it can be accessed by mobile devices, tablet, or iPad. Teachers can set up grade books for their students which can visible to individual students which holds them accountable for their one learning.

In analyzing this online assessment program, I like that assessments are rated and sorted by the ratings. From time to time, MasteryConnect conducts random reviews of teacher made assessments and provides comprehensive details to inform the alignment to the standards.

There is a collaborative social networking element to MasteryConnect as teachers can share assessments, follow each other, and pin resources. However without a paid subscription, the learning community to share and collaborate on resources is limited.

MasteryConnect does not promote higher level thinking for students. This program fuels the lower level of Bloom's Taxonomy by asking multiple choice questions to prepare students for state EOGs. Continuously testing and assessing the students does not guarantee an increase in student performance. In fact, students can lose engagement and become very stagnate in their learning if all they do is answer multiple choice questions. MasteryConnect needs to expand its capabilities to incorporate peer to peer discourse. More rigorous assessments of learning must be included in the black and white world of MasteryConnect.

References
Armstrong, P.  (2019, February 26). Vanderbilt University - Bloom's Taxonomy. Retrieved from https://wp0.vanderbilt.edu/cft/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/

MasteryConnect. (2019, February 17). Retrieved from https://www.masteryconnect.com/.

MasteryConnect. (2015, February 26). MasteryConnect Overview. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWBW9z0kD0s&t=5s.

MasteryConnect. (2012, August 3). Mastery Connect In A Nutshell. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZj9bottmCE.

MasteryConnect. (2015, February 5). How MasteryLearning is Empowering Students, Reshaping a Town - Piedmont Alabama. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3FkaB97ouY.