This intersegmental project led by California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), El Camino College, and Universty of California, Berkeley (UCB) will build upon their proficiency-based learning curriculum and develop concept mapping tools for faculty and students to track progress in student learning and mastery. Their initial project, “Reorienting Formative and Summative Assessment Towards Mastery Learning” argued for the many benefits of Proficiency-based Learning (hereafter PBL). In it, they proposed to “Reorient courses, then departments, then colleges, and eventually the entire institution…working ‘from the bottom up’ with instructors to develop Parameterized [random] Question Generators (PQGs) and ‘from the top down’ by working with campus leaders”. Their approach, based on research performed even before Bloom’s well-known work on “2 sigma,” leverages the observation that with sufficient time, any student can in principle achieve any desired proficiency.
In efforts to scale the successes of this work, seek to create a sustainable model for developing faculty and student capacity for generating PQGs for their courses, design and implement their Concept Map navigator which automates the concept mastery tracking system to assist both students and instructors track knowledge gaps. In conjunction with this system, new and automated policy processes for “PBL-designated” courses will allow for greater flexibility in student learning time either across courses.
