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Not All Competency-Based Programs Look Alike

• Each Project Mastery grantee emphasized different aspects of competency-based education. Some placed greater emphasis on student choice and project-based learning, while others focused on flexible pacing and evaluation for proficiency.

Tensions Exist in Implementing the Approach

• Sites faced challenges in determining how to provide credit for out-of-school activities, including afterschool activities and travel-based learning experiences.
• Sites experienced tension in holding all students to a common definition of proficiency and evaluating students strictly based on performance, not effort.
• Sites faced challenges in providing enough computer hardware so that students could use new competency-based curricula or in identifying funds that would permit expansion of new curricula beyond the pilot initiatives.
• Sites reported that students with weak academic backgrounds may require extra support under competency-based models.

Student Experiences Were More Similar Than Expected

• Because the programmatic details of the Project Mastery sites were varied, one striking finding was the similarity of students' self-reported experiences across sites.
• The highest student reports of engagement, flexible pacing, and choice came from a site in which respondents were focused on yearlong, self-directed projects that applied academic content to real-world contexts.

Student Performance Varied Across Sites

• Effects of competency-based models on student learning appeared most positive in programs that put primary emphasis on student choice with project-based learning.
• However, the research design did not permit causal inference, and these findings could be at least partially due to students' or teachers' selection into the programs.

In 2011, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation created the Project Mastery grant program to support competency-based education initiatives in large school systems that serve a high proportion of disadvantaged youth. Competency-based education meets students where they are academically, provides students with opportunities for choice, and awards credit for evidence of learning, not for the time students spend studying a subject. The Foundation asked RAND to evaluate these efforts in terms of implementation, students' experiences, and student performance. This report presents final results from that evaluation, offering an overview of competency-based education and the Project Mastery grant projects and describing the implementation of competency-based educational features under each project. The report concludes with six lessons for policy, partnerships, and practice.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  Evaluation Settings and Methodological Approach

• Chapter Three

  Intervention Development and Implementation

• Chapter Four

  Tensions in the Implementation of Competency-Based Models

• Chapter Five

  Students' Experiences in the Project Mastery Pilot Classes

• Chapter Six

  Student Outcomes in the Project Mastery Sites

• Chapter Seven

  Conclusion