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What Does Concept Mastery Look Like?

Teaching a concept to mastery is a critical concern when teaching your struggling reader. Very often at school these students find the class is moving on to the next lesson before they have had a chance to master the current concept. Since, as a rule, the next concepts build on these and previous concepts, gaps begin to occur for these students and their foundation begins to fail to support them.

So, as you work with your student how will you know when they have mastered a concept and are ready to move to the next one? Generally, we consider mastery to occur when they are 90% accurate or better. They do not have to be 100% and it does not mean that you will not continue to review and work with those concepts. Each concept is a part of the foundation and will be constantly cycled back to and
built upon. These concepts are very much like layers of an onion and achieving mastery involves constantly adding layers to the concept through review, practice, and the integration of that concept with new concepts.

As students take concepts to mastery, they reduce the cognitive load and free up brain energy for learning and applying new concepts. Initially, students will need reminders and prompts to verbalize their reasoning in applying spelling patterns or checking a word and then correcting an error. However, with repetitive practice strong neural tracks are developed (much like learning to ride a bike) and the skill becomes truly automatic. At that point, true long-term mastery has occurred, and review and practice are no longer necessary. While mastery of a concept is necessary before moving to the next concept, you are not seeking long-term mastery. That will come down the road as you add layers to the onion and build
upon the foundation. However, it is the short-term mastery of each level that provides you a strong foundation without gaps on which to build. Again, part of the goal is to teach a skill or concept to the level of overlearning so that it is so automatic it frees up cognitive space for working memory and builds processing speed.

Parents may often wonder if they are going too fast or too slow.

Among those using Orton-Gillingham or Multisensory Structured Literacy methodology, there is a very common saying, “Go as fast as you can, but as slow as you must.” That means we recognize that these students already experience reading delays. There is no time to waste in closing these gaps. We need to plug them in where the need is and not reteach skills that are already there. We need to teach skills in as efficient and effective a sequence as possible. However, it is unproductive to throw too many concepts at them at once or concepts for which the prior foundational concepts have not been taught. Likewise, it is unproductive to move them too quickly forward to new concepts when mastery has not been taught just because we think they are already behind, and we have no time to spare. It is when this is done that their foundation fails them, and more time is lost in having to go back and reteach to strengthen the foundation or close the gaps that did not truly close because mastery was not created.

Determining mastery can often be a tricky thing.

It is not unusual for a student to appear to have achieved mastery one day and then a few days later not be able to demonstrate mastery on the very same concept. Many things can play into a student’s ability to demonstrate mastery from one day to the next. Fatigue, stress, attention, and engagement with the lesson are just a few of the factors. For this reason, we have included several lessons for each concept. Additionally, there will be ideas included for ways that you can use the lessons for continued or reteaching without your student feeling like you are going over and over the same ground. Finally, concepts will be used in regular reviews in ongoing lessons to help maintain your student’s mastery skills.

As you proceed through the lessons, you will become more proficient in observing and recognizing indicators of mastery in your student. This is important since no assessment tool can fully describe mastery in a student by itself. You will learn to look at your student’s performance in a variety of areas such as their fluency in individual word reading, accuracy and fluency in reading sentences and passages, spelling, and sentence dictation from lesson to lesson in addition to how they did on a one-time post assessment.

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