Mastery Learning in Computer Science Education

Mastery learning is a pedagogical approach in which students must demonstrate mastery of the currently assessed unit of material before being permitted to progress to the next unit. Recent work has suggested that mastery learning may provide a solution to the divergent outcomes observed in introductory computer science (CS) courses. While mastery learning has shown benefits outside of CS, it has received less attention in CS education, and there is no existing overview of the approaches that have been used in this discipline. To remedy this, we review the literature on the use of mastery learning in computer science. We find that while mastery learning has been applied successfully in CS education, the literature is sparse and lacks a unified approach and generalisable results.