Mastery Self Paced

This course is comprised of a series of Individual Study Units. Each unit contains the sections outlined below.

1. Unit Learning Objectives: the concepts, skills, and knowledge you will need to master.
2. Unit Learning Activities: You will develop an understanding of the learning objectives for this chemistry course by completing a variety of learning activities such as reading, questions, and problems; white boarding in groups; labs and activities. While these activities don’t directly affect your grade, they are essential in that they are your opportunity to explore, discover, take risks, fail, ask questions, help each other, practice, and get feedback before having to demonstrate your understanding. You will need to read through these each time you begin a new unit so that you can make an estimation of how long each activity will take you to complete. Since the pace of unit completion is ultimately up to YOU, I ask that you make your own goals and study plan for completing the unit using your planner (I will be checking to see that you have done so). You will need to obtain my initials after the completion of each individual activity (especially labs).
3. Unit Self-Quiz: This is a practice test to help you gauge your understanding of the unit’s objectives before taking the graded unit quiz. It is recommended that you do not attempt the self-test until you have completed ALL of the learning activities. If you are having to frequently refer back to the unit while taking the self-test, this is a good indicator that you are not ready to take the unit quiz and should go back through the unit, or seek help from peers or the instructor. If you can easily complete the unit self-test on your own, then you are ready to move on to the unit quiz.
4. Unit Test: This is designed to test your mastery of the unit’s objectives. If you do not show mastery of the objective on the first try, this will not count against you. However, in order to have the opportunity to retry the objectives you missed, you will be asked to review the learning activities for the objectives you missed and to come in for tutoring if necessary. In order to retake a test over the learning objectives you have not mastered, you will need to schedule a time during or after class. You may only take one unit test per day.
5. Cumulative Progress: As chemistry is a cumulative learning experience (there are no units that are independent and don’t affect future units), there will be many opportunities for you to demonstrate mastery on earlier goals if you don’t master it the first time. This sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? On the other hand, this means that there will also be plenty of opportunities for you to demonstrate that you have forgotten earlier learning goals. If this regrettable situation occurs, your score on that particular goal will fall. Thus, you cannot expect to cram for a particular assessment, forget what you have learned, and never think about it again. If you have really mastered something, you should be able to do it more than once.

Important Note: Grades will be assigned based on your mastery of the learning goals only. Grades will not be affected by issues such as lateness of work, effort, attitude, participation, and attendance. Those factors are still VERY IMPORTANT and will be reported separately.