Student mastery of material from an introductory statistics course was compared across courses that differed by whether a progressive mastery testing method was used. Students taught using progressive mastery methods showed increases in exam scores. The increases were small but of the same order of magnitude as increases associated with earning a course grade of A versus B+ and as increases associated with 100 points increases on the SAT math test. The increase in exam scores was about 75% of the increase associated with having taken a high school advanced placement course in addition to the college introductory course. However these increases were short lived as these students showed double rates of decline when tested in follow-up semesters. All benefit of the method vanished within two semesters.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education