Mastery assessment

This skill checks whether the learner holds a module's claims — not whether they recognize them. Recognition is cheap and treacherous: a learner reads "heritability is a property of a population, not a trait," nods, and feels they know it. Retrieval is the test. This skill asks the learner to produce the claim, the mechanism, and an application from memory before any prompt is shown, then probes exactly where production broke. The retrieval effort is the point, not a side effect — see [[learning-system|LEARNING_SYSTEM.md]] and the desirable-difficulty principle in conventions.md §8.

It composes three skills: [[evaluation-rubrics]] supplies the band descriptors and scoring scale, memory-retrieval-learning supplies the spacing schedule and the case for testing-as-encoding, and socratic-teaching-scaffolds supplies the question ladder used to probe a gap without lecturing the answer back in.

This is an assessment, not a tutoring session. The job is to measure and schedule, not to teach. When a gap is found, probe it once or twice to characterize it, then record it — do not slide into a lecture. The reading loop handles teaching; this loop handles measurement.

Inputs

• The module being assessed (pNmM) and its question-bank note in assessments/question-banks/.
• The evergreen notes tagged with that module (the core claims under test).
• Each note's current mastery band and review-due date.
• The last assessment-session note for this module, if one exists (for trend and to recall prior misconceptions).

The closed-book-first protocol

Run every probe through four moves, in order. Never collapse them.