Black and Anderson propose that the teacher begin the setup of all the curriculum with the plan in mind that all of his or her students will pass. While acknowledging that any classroom of students comes with varying levels of ability and motivation, they propose the teacher break down each subject into individual and quantifiable lessons so that the students can identify what exactly is to be learned and what they must do to master that knowledge.
In their preface they define mastery learning as "a teaching philosophy asserting that under appropriate instructional conditions virtually all students can learn well most of what they are taught in school" (iii). Aptitude is therefore "not an index of the level to which a student could learn" but "a measure of learning rate" (2). The key to their proposal is therefore this definition of the belief behind their method, and any evaluation of their method would then rest on the validity of their belief. Obviously, the student identified as learning or mentally handicapped would not fit this category. The student with a lower than average IQ is a student who has a lower than average ability to both process and retain information. This student would not be asked to master the same material the other students mastered.
With memory and processing of information not an issue, the remaining issues are, as mentioned, ability and motivation. Ability, then, is time, space, materials, food, family stability, cooperative peers, and any other element necessary for uninterrupted learning and studying. The authors also state "the degree of school learning of a given subject depends on the student's perseverance or his opportunity to learn, relative to his aptitude for the subject, the quality of his instruction, and his ability to understand this instruction" (2). "Aptitude" here means whether he has a natural talent for the subject or not. Whether the student does or does not, he will have to l...