Work in progress — Implementation and research of Mastery learning at an HBCU

Abstract

While studying a Mastery approach for learning Engineering Circuit Analysis at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMA), early findings suggested that the approach improved the performance and retention of all students, with particularly dramatic results for women and minorities. However, because the number of women and minority students at UMA is small, we have decided to study the implementation of Mastery at an HBCU, specifically the College of Engineering at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NCAT), one of the nation's premier engineering schools with a predominantly African American student population. In this Work-in-Progress, we will summarize the features of Mastery learning that make it difficult, but attractive, to implement. We will also review the results for women and minority students at UMA. Then we will describe the recent trends in retention and graduation rates at NCAT that led the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department there to radically change how Circuit Analysis is taught. Finally, we will provide an overview of the research plan we have developed for studying the implementation of Mastery learning.