The effect of mastery learning designed for distance education on students' success and attitude

This study aims at exploring the effects of mastery learning on students' success, attitude and retention for the course Islamıc Law II, a course for the Theology Bachelor's degree delivered as distance education program (İLİTAM). Data collection was done by utilizing from an experimental desing with pre-test post-test control grup. Purposeful sampling was prefered so as to get more detailed data for the study. The population of the study consists of two groups of students; Branch A having 93 students and Branch B having 89 students. Choosing the students for experimental and control groups from these two branches have also been decided randomly. Experimental group consists of 49 students who have participated in the applications as the Branch B and also having the other criteria reguired. Success test and attitude scale have been appilied on the gained data in the resarch and evaluations have been developed accordingly. Experiment and control groups were compared in terms of success test and attitude scale as separete groups and also within each group. While distance education for mastery learning is applied for the experiment group, tradational method as distance education is applied for the control group. Applications have continiued for 11 weeks starting from the 14th week, including five teaching units. Follow up tests were given after each unit for Islamic Law II course given as distance education based on mastery learning model and lowest level of success for these tests was expected to be seventy percent at least for the eighty percent of students. If the student success was below seventy percent, a complete training was given. If the expected success was not still reached, tutoring was aplied for those students. Research findings show that students' success for both groups has increased. Yet the students in control group have been found more successfull than the experiment group. The average points of experiment group was found as seventy percent which is accepted as the minimum value for mastery learning. 11 students (22%) in the experment group had points below 70 where as the other 38 students (78%) in the same group had an avarage point of X ̅=83.68. Findings also show that there is a meaninfull difference between post test and retention points for both groups. When the retention test results were compared, experiment group students' points were found higher than the control group students. Considering the results about attitude, it was seen that mastery learning had a positive effect on students' attitudes towards Islamic Law II course. It was found out that the post-test scores which the students in the experimental group obtained from the attitude scale related to Islamic Law II course were significantly higher than the scores of the students in the control group. No significant difference was seen in the attitudes of the students in the control group towards Islamic Law II course. Based on the research findings, mastery learning was suggested to be used for web based distance education programmes. Also it has been suggested to conduct similar studies for different courses and compare the results with each other.