Mastery-based learning draft

content/posts/2022-07-19-mastery-based-learning.md

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+title = "Mastery-Based Learning"
+date = 2022-07-19
+tags = ["education"]
+draft = true
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+
+A thought I've been brewing probably since undergrad is the idea of
+mastery-based education for skill-based practices. Directly inspired by the
+language learning apps, I wonder whether we can enhance a traditional spaced
+repetition system with a topic graph, where mastery can "spill" throughout the
+graph to better model learning. Since I'm never going to have time to actually
+build such a system, I thought I'd just jot these ideas down.
+
+### Knowledge Graph
+
+The first piece of this setup would require having an extensive knowledge graph.
+Think Wikipedia, where it has a lot of related topics, but rather than just
+being linked in an ad-hoc manner, each link has one or more of the following
+specific purposes:
+
+- **Dependency.** The linked topic needs some percentage of mastery in order
+    to best experience the current topic.
+- **Spill.** Not really sure what a good term for this would be, but basically
+    mastery of the current topic would result in some percentage of "spilled"
+    mastery gain for the linked topic.
+
+The dependency aspect allows people to work backwards, starting from what they
+don't know and being able to query what the required context is. They can build
+themselves a learning plan based on a topological sorting of those topics and
+tackle them individually.
+
+The spill aspect allows people to "skip" learning things they already know, for
+a faster onboarding experience. For example, since "the quadratic formula"
+requires someone to know "algebra", then if someone masters the quadratic
+formula before algebra, it should boost the mastery of algebra too.
+
+### Mastery Level
+
+I think the current way tests are handled are not only stressful, but a horrible
+way to measure mastery. Rather than promoting long-term learning, it encourages
+the cram-and-forget workflow. I think what the language learning apps taught us
+is not only is it good to repeat things when we get it wrong, it's also good to
+repeat things when we get it right.
+
+The vision would be something like this:
+
+1. First, the student learns some material. They take a short quiz immediately,
+   and their mastery is boosted by a small percentage depending on their score,
+   maybe up to 30%.
+
+2. Then, the student goes off and learns some related material. After a length
+   of time has passed, they are quizzed on the first topic again. By this time,
+   their mastery score should fall a bit simply on the basis of "forgetfulness
+   over time".
+
+3. At the end of the semester, if they have reached required thresholds of
+   mastery in each required topic, they will pass the class.
+
+Not only does this simplify final grading, it also removes the whole concept of
+stress in the middle, since doing badly on one exam doesn't hurt your grade
+permanently. On top of that, doing _well_ on a single exam doesn't guarantee
+that you know it, and the system models that by not giving you full mastery
+after a single test.
+
+But this doesn't necessarily mean that the student must re-take tests on things
+they already know. The great thing about the whole "spill" system is that if
+they learn topic A first, then topic B that depends on topic A, then topic B can
+indirectly keep topic A's mastery afloat.
+
+### Implementation Challenges
+
+Implementation is the toughest part. There's a couple technical hurdles I would
+like to complete before attempting such a system, which are:
+
+- A markup similar to Restructured Text. This should make learning material be
+    produced and overlayed in an intuitive way for readers.
+
+- A bunch of interactive widgets for allowing users to play around with the
+    material directly. This is more applicable in math and science curriculums.
+
+- Quiz generation software. There's probably good off-the-shelf components
+    already, I haven't looked.
+
+Another problem is that I never want to think about dealing with cheating. If
+this idea were to be neatly packaged up and deployed into schools, you bet the
+first problem teachers are going to have is with cheating. While there are some
+stopgaps such as auto-generated quizzes and personalized curriculums, there's
+never a guaranteed solution. Instead, fostering a healthy learning attitude
+among students is the best way for these systems to be effective.
+
+My final disclaimer is that I'm not an educator. I've TA'd for a functional
+programming course in undergrad and helped many peers learn programming concepts
+from time to time. Watching people learn is a very interesting process, and
+while I don't have time to conduct studies on how this process works, there's
+general patterns I picked up on while following this train of thought.