Mastery Learning of Complex Skills: A Simulation

• In Event: Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: Explorations at the Intersection of Technology and Learning

Abstract

If a complex skill is learned by sequentially mastering component subskills, does the order in which subskills are learned affect the difficulty and efficiency of mastering the whole skill? We randomly generated eight learning hierarchies and modeled forgetting as non-linear decay. Learners were modeled at two levels of learning ability (high and low). Two learning paths were planned through each learning hierarchy, one imposing a theoretically high memory load (75th percentile for the learning hierarchy) and the other a theoretically low memory load (25th percentile). A simulation of learner progress through the learning hierarchies indicated higher memory load sequences significantly expand time to learn complex skills, and expansion is more extreme for lower ability learners.

Authors

• John Cale Nesbit, Simon Fraser University

• Mladen Rakovic, Simon Fraser University

• Philip H. Winne, Simon Fraser University

• Misha Jain, Simon Fraser University