Seyedeh Azam Sajadi - Baqiyatallah University of Medical Sciences. Instructor of Nursing faculty of AJA University of Medical Sciences,Tehran, Iran
Abbas Ebadi - Faculty of Nursing, Baqiyatallah University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
Morteza Khaghanizadeh - Behavioral Science Research Center, Baqiyatallah University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

Introduction: As a large part of human resources in the health system, nurses play animportant role in promoting public health. One of the ways to provide better health servicesis training qualified nurses. This is why mastery learning would be one of the most effectiveeducational approaches to realize it. Despite its numerous advantages, the implementationof mastery learning is facing challenges. This study is to examine the effectiveness and thechallenges of mastery learning.Methods: This study is a systematic review with an extensive search to find articles fromPersian and English databases using the keywords of “education”, “health care research”,“evaluation”, “mastery learning”, “medical education”, and “nursing education” either aloneor in combination with each other in the websites of Cumulative Index of Nursing and AlliedHealth Literature (CINAHL), Scopus, Medline, Embase, PsycINFO, and SID. In this regard,138 research papers published from 2005 to 2015 which were in line with the researchquestion were found. After an examination, 16 articles were included in the study. The datafrom the articles were summarized, classified and analyzed based on the research question.Results: Although mastery learning increases the educational effectiveness, itsimplementation for reasons such as the applicability to some subjects, time consumption,learners’ various individual characteristics, talented students’ lagging behind other learners,frequent formative assessments, and frequent test-designing require more efforts both by theteacher and the learners.Conclusion: Students raised through this method are competent students having theminimum requirements to perform their duties in the future. Therefore, proper curriculumdesign, introduction of this approach to teaching institutions and learners, empowerment ofteachers, and pilot studies related to the solutions to address its challenges could help inexploiting this approach in theoretical and clinical education.

Mastery learning, Nursing education, Competency-based education