What is the Mastery Dashboard?

How to populate, access, and navigate your Mastery Dashboards

Coleman Tharpe avatar
Written by Coleman Tharpe
Updated over a week ago

Our Mastery Dashboards give you an up-to-date view of each student's mastery of each topic and skill within a course.

This allows you to quickly see where students are struggling and work out where to focus your teaching. After you have carried out some further teaching to address any learning gaps, simply assign your students another quiz and the mastery dashboards will update to reflect their new levels of understanding.

You can populate your mastery dashboards gradually over time with single skill quizzes designed to test what you have been teaching that week or populate them with end of topic or end of term quizzes that cover multiple skills. You can combine these two approaches as often and as much as you like and the dashboards will always update to reflect the most recent results.  

PRO TIP: You can also try "spiralling" where your weekly quiz might contain five to ten questions on the skill you have been teaching this week and then a couple of questions from each of the skills you taught earlier in the term. 

Populating your Mastery Dashboards

The mastery dashboards are only populated by CURRICULUM TAGGED QUIZZES. It's easy to find or create your own curriculum tagged quiz, check out our How to Find or Create Curriculum Tagged Quizzes article.

PRO TIP: Don't neglect assessing topics and skills from previous years, subjects, and courses. This article from Room to Discover brilliantly points out the importance of foundational skills building. We believe using formative assessment as a pre-assessment is just as important, if not more so, than using formative assessment as post-assessment. You can populate your dashboard with multiple courses for each class.

Accessing your Mastery Dashboards

Each class you create has an Activity list, Mastery Dashboard and Gradebook which you can quickly access from the top left menu bar for your currently selected class. Click Mastery to enter the Mastery Dashboard.


When you enter the Mastery Dashboard for the first time, it will automatically show the Courses Overview showing a Course Summary box with the overall progress of your class for any course a) to which you have already explicitly tagged your class (when you created class, for example) or b) for which quizzes your class has taken have been tagged to.

You can also easily delete unnecessary courses or add new courses for your class here if you wish by clicking the settings cog.

If you click on any Course Summary box you will go through to the Topics level view for that course.

  • Course refers to a particular subject and year level within a curriculum (eg. "North Carolina Standard Course, Mathematics, Grade 4")

Understanding Mastery Bars

The Course Summary boxes, Topics view and Skills view in our Mastery Dashboards display mastery bars that give you a quick visual indication of performance and completion for students, courses, topics and skills. The proportion of each colour in the bar represents the proportion of skills that have been mastered to that level for a student, course, topic or skill.

The entire bar represents 100% of skills that could be tested for a student, course, topic, skill or class. The proportion that is green represents the proportion that have been mastered.

Rose Brown has mastered 28% of the 25 skills in this course. With 4 skills in the Operations and Algebraic Thinking topic and 10 students in the class, there are 40 skills to be mastered for the topic in total of which 68% (27) have been mastered so far. And 50% of the students have mastered the skill shown.

Example of mastery calculation for a class:

Imagine there are 10 students in a class and the course has 25 skills. Then in total there are 250 skills to be learnt by that class. Assume:

  • 2 students master 10 skills each => each has 40% mastery performance

  • 3 students master 15 skills each => each has 60% mastery performance

  • 5 students master 20 skills each => each has 80% mastery performance

For the whole class 2*10 + 3*15 + 5*20 = 165 skills have been mastered out of 250 skills and so the class has 66% Class Mastery.

Understanding Mastery Levels

A mastery bar represents the level of mastery for a number of skills for a student, course, topic or quiz, but how do we decide what level of mastery each student has achieved for each skill?

We calculate the level of mastery by looking at the percentage of questions tagged to each skill that were answered correctly by each student.  We only look at up to the 5 most recently answered questions for each skill.

  • Green = Mastered (80% or more of the questions were answered correctly)

  • Yellow = Almost There (50%-79.9% of the questions were answered correctly)

  • Red = Not Mastered (less than 50% of the questions were answered correctly)

Example of Mastery Calculation

This student has answered 3 of the last 5 questions (or 60%) for this skill correctly and so would be classified as "Almost There". Note that the oldest 2 questions answered are not used in the calculation as we weigh more recent performance over past performance.

Topics View

When you click on a Course Summary box, you will drill down into the Topics view that shows a summary of performance and completion for the topics in that course.

In this topics view you have the following:

  • Percentage mastery performance for the whole course for each student - at the left of each row

  • Percentage mastery performance for each topic - at the top of each column

  • Number of skills mastered by each student / number of skills in the topic - in each cell

You also have the mastery bars showing a visual summary of the mastery levels for students and topics.

In this view you can pinpoint which topics the class needs to work on as a whole, and which topics each student is struggling with most. You can develop topic level individualized learning plans for each student based on their strengths and weaknesses. 

Skills View

When you click on a topic, you will drill down into the Skills view that shows the skills covered in that topic.


In this skills view you have the following:

  • Percentage mastery performance for the whole topic for each student - at the left of each row

  • Percentage mastery performance for each skill - at the top of each column

  • Percentage of the last 5 questions answered correctly by each student for each skill - in each cell

You also have the mastery bars showing a visual summary of the mastery levels for students and skills.

Each cell is color coded corresponding to the level of mastery achieved by the student.  Coloured circles highlight where students have not achieved mastery to make it easier for you see where students are struggling. 

In this view you can pinpoint which specific skills the class needs to work on as a whole, and which specific skills each student is struggling with most.

Can we support your curriculum, standard or syllabus? 

Of course (and please do excuse the pun)! We're working towards supporting every school curricula around the world. So please do contact us through live chat (see bottom right of this screen) if you would like us to set up a new curriculum for you. We will send you the excel template for you to fill in and once you have done so and sent it back to us, it will take us around 48 hours to get it live.

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