Mastery Learning in CS1 - An Invitation to Procrastinate?: Reflecting on Six Years of Mastery Learning

Claudia Ott, Brendan McCane, Nick Meek

Abstract: Over six years we developed our first-year programming course, delivered through scheduled lectures and assessed by practical tests and a final examination, into a mastery learning-oriented course. In this study we provide an in-depth view of how successive adjustments to the course resulted in changes in student behaviour impacting task completion, final grades and activity patterns. Data from this period involving over 1300 students is presented and augmented with student feedback. Our results show that the successive move to a fully-fledged mastery model resulted in an overall decreasing task completion with longer periods of inactivity. Interventions to increase student engagement with the course were only partly successful. In this paper we present a long-term study to highlight opportunities and challenges when shifting to a mastery learning model.