Certainly, there is a difference between mastery and expertise, but depending on the curriculum the idea of mastery goes beyond Bloom's rote memory and moves so that student's can demonstrate competence and an ability to synthesize past information (Lalley and Gentile, 2009, 29-30).
The idea, though, is to ask ourselves as educators what the point of assessment is: grading for parents and administrators, checking progress, or as a learning tool to help both students and instructor gague how much of the material has been mastered. Effective teaching is dependent upon a number of different factors and cannot easily be quantified. These factors include a number of qualitative issues (cognitive skills, maturity, demographics, etc.), content area, expertise in subject matter, and so forth. However, regardless of the stimuli given, it is possible to use planning, pedagogical technique, and certain activities to make any lesson more effective. To make skills more embedded, it would be wise to use some of the following:
(2009). Classroom Assessment and Grading to Assure Mastery.
Theory Into Practice. 48 (1): 28-35
