MASTERY LEARNING ON THE MOVE IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA

It is pleasing that after all these years of problems with Outcome Based Education, there has now been a break through with our promotion of Mastery Learning.

 

We read on Google of the severe criticisms of Outcome Based Education which are criticisms quite deserved. Australian advisors brought the strategy to PNG years ago but did not know enough to make it work.

 

Mastery Learning began in the 1950s and probably before that. It was intended to practise students over and over with sequences of exercises and skills until they were able to achieve. But it received a shock in 1956 when the Soviet Union sent up a satellite Sputnik and traumatized the US Government.

 

The Americans always believed that they had the superior education system with superior technology. But now the Soviets were in space and the Americans were not.

 

So the US started a knee jerk reaction with changes to education that had to start training rocket scientists. There was no more education focussed on the average child but on high level scientists learning mathematics and science.

 

So the basics were to be ignored. Students were to pick up the basics as they went along. They were to run before they crawled They learned to read by reading and write by writing. This has failed as the discipline of study was lost.

 

In early years, students were required to spell words. Some had to write words out 20 times if they made a mistake. They learned from the start with phonics that built up into children able to spell and use hundreds of words. But all of this is lost.

 

There has been trauma in Papua New Guinea over the last decade. Focus was no longer on the basics but on research. But there were not enough text books for students to use and not enough reference books in the library.

Students of PNG wrote in work books what the teacher wrote on the black board. They learn by total memorization with the inability to put ideas in their own words. There is no discussion in most lessons as students are too busy writing the blackboard summary into their books.

 

The founder of Mastery Learning was Dr Benjamin Bloom. His strategy was promptly hyjacked and turned by academics into Outcome Based Education. Basics were gone. Australian advisors introduced the Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives but never showed the PNG teachers what to do with it.

 

Now the educational system in PNG is changing. Outcome Based Education is being replaced by something or other. We are not sure what. The Department of Education headed by Dr Tapo has commissioned a team of Australians to prepare a new syllabus.

 

Let us hope that the team will bring back old time education based on phonics, sentence structure, connectors, complex sentences, derivation from Latin roots, spelling, forms of words, writing in own words and memorization.

 

The foolish teachers of the past decades believed that memorization was a lower level of learning. It is by itself. But so much has to be committed to memory.

 

My mother went to school in the 1920s and would boast that at the age of 12, she knew the names of all the capes and bays around Australia. That was surely carrying memorization too far. Of what use was this in her life?

 

But now there is a return to Mastery Learning in a number of schools of Papua New Guinea. Students are being required to complete sequences of writing patterns until they master all the complex basics of the English language.

 

Then the focus will move to Mastery Learning in Science, Biology and Mathematics. Let us hope that the new team of curriculum writers will produce work to supplement the task of promoting Mastery Learning.

Bruce Copeland BA BEdSt (Queensland)