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What Students Do (And Don't Do) in Khan Academy

blog.mrmeyer.com

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Re: What Students Do (And Don't Do) in Khan Academy

#11

Post by yummyfajitas »

iandanforth wrote: post #4

Please for the love of maths do not "align" with the common core standards. It would be the saddest, most disheartening thing imaginable* for Khan Academy to become a feeder to the American standardized testing system. The author writes: "If one of Khan Academy’s goals is to prepare students for success in Common Core mathematics, they’re emphasizing the wrong set of skills." I would like nothing better than the acad…

Consider a well designed test of an important curriculum. This means the topics are important for $REASONS, and the test is highly correlated with knowledge of the topics. If a student asks "why is this important", you can reply "$REASONS". And you can "teach to the test" secure in the knowledge that you are teaching useful materials.

Now, if you believe the curriculum is poorly designed or the test is poorly correlated with it, I encourage you to make that argument. But explaining why "Know relative sizes of measurement units within one system of units including km, m, cm..." should not be part of the curriculum is a lot harder than making emotional pleas about "love of the subject".

(I've skimmed parts of the common core on a few occasions. It looks pretty good to me. http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/4/MD/ )

Re: What Students Do (And Don't Do) in Khan Academy

#12

Post by Patrick_Devine »

I've noticed with most critiques of KA that they set up a straw man of what KA is trying to accomplish, and then they attack that, almost always without giving a better alternative.

The fact is KA is a great tool for learning many subjects, and will only continue to improve. The biggest take aways should be:

- spaced repetition of subject matter is extremely useful for long term memorization - bite sized, repeatable lessons allow students to digest more and "rewind" over parts of lectures they may have missed - "gameification" and small rewards are useful for getting students to keep pursuing a subject - students shouldn't move on to more advanced subjects until they've mastered a particular foundational skill

No teaching tool or method is going to be perfect, but I think KA gives parents, educators and most importantly students a really useful tool for self-paced learning that traditional methods can't easily offer.

Re: What Students Do (And Don't Do) in Khan Academy

#13

Post by davmre »

iandanforth wrote: post #4

Please for the love of maths do not "align" with the common core standards. It would be the saddest, most disheartening thing imaginable* for Khan Academy to become a feeder to the American standardized testing system. The author writes: "If one of Khan Academy’s goals is to prepare students for success in Common Core mathematics, they’re emphasizing the wrong set of skills." I would like nothing better than the acad…

I interpreted the article as making exactly the opposite of your point: because Khan Academy is limited to automated grading, they can only ask standardized-test style questions: solve an equation, select a multiple-choice answer, etc. Meanwhile, the Common Core standards emphasize argumentation (i.e. proofs), formulating equations, and other high-level skills that are harder to test directly but are much more important to actually getting a deep understanding.

Common Core is not a set of tests; it's just a curriculum that sets some basic standards for what students ought to learn. It's reasonable to be concerned about standardized testing as a means for assessing whether those standards are being met, but it doesn't sound like you actually have any objection to the Common Core curriculum.

Re: What Students Do (And Don't Do) in Khan Academy

#16

Post by IndianAstronaut »

Patrick_Devine wrote: post #12

I've noticed with most critiques of KA that they set up a straw man of what KA is trying to accomplish, and then they attack that, almost always without giving a better alternative. The fact is KA is a great tool for learning many subjects, and will only continue to improve. The biggest take aways should be: - spaced repetition of subject matter is extremely useful for long term memorization - bite sized, repeatable…

It should be noted that there are huge vested interests who want to tear down Khan academy and similar sites.

Re: What Students Do (And Don't Do) in Khan Academy

#17

Post by Spooky23 »

jwmerrill wrote: post #10
Spooky23 wrote: post #2

Reading this article reinforced a perception I walked away with at an event where parents were complaining about common core related topics. The professional educator dialect of English is not very approachable for the layman. To many people it sounds like somebody throwing out $10 words to make the arguments sound more intelligent.

> The professional educator dialect of English is not very approachable for the layman. I think Dan's blog is largely pitched at other professional educators. All professions develop their own technical vocabulary. As an analogy, I recently enjoyed an article about the implementation of the v8 garbage collector by Jay Conrod: http://jayconrod.com/posts/55/a-tour-of-v8-garbage-collectio... Here's a sample paragraph: "…

Agreed. I've found that a lot of education officials hide behind that jargon, that's all. Totally get the domain specific jargon. I've seen my wife glaze in about 30s when I start muttering about tech stuff!

Re: What Students Do (And Don't Do) in Khan Academy

#18

Post by 21echoes »

iandanforth wrote: post #4

Please for the love of maths do not "align" with the common core standards. It would be the saddest, most disheartening thing imaginable* for Khan Academy to become a feeder to the American standardized testing system. The author writes: "If one of Khan Academy’s goals is to prepare students for success in Common Core mathematics, they’re emphasizing the wrong set of skills." I would like nothing better than the acad…

This response shows a willful ignorance of the stated goals of Common Core, especially with relation to the Common Core math curriculum. Common Core's primary pedagogical shift in math is to remove the historical focus on math as a set of mindless procedures, and instead teach children math as a broader, more holistic approach to logical & numerical reasoning. Common Core teaches children to solve problems many different ways, make arguments about why both tactics work, etc. This is about as far as one can be from the traditional "teaching to the test" downsides.

Re: What Students Do (And Don't Do) in Khan Academy

#19

Post by 21echoes »

mathu7 wrote: post #8
mathu7 wrote: post #6

I think all these sites (treehouse, code academy etc) are going to be hit with class action lawsuits for implying that their app/whatever will make you proficient at coding, and even land you a job. There are no shortcuts to becoming good at coding. It takes much longer and is much harder than these sites make it seem.

yay down-votes. I'm not gonna delete the comment. I'll just make a new account

in case you missed why your comment didn't add to the conversation: Khan Academy and the article are both not about coding or learning to code. This article is about math.

Re: What Students Do (And Don't Do) in Khan Academy

#20

Post by zanny »

spicyj wrote: post #7
tokenadult wrote: post #3

The author writes, in the interesting blog post submitted here, "We should wonder why Khan Academy emphasizes this particular work. I have no inside knowledge of Khan Academy’s operations or vision." Actually, here on Hacker News we have had public discussions blessed with direct participation by Khan Academy developers, so I think I have some sense of what Khan Academy intends to do as it continues to develop online…

(I work at Khan Academy.) > The Khan Academy developers have devoted a lot of thought to hope to computerize problems rather than exercises, and they are still working on building new problem types for the mathematics lessons. I'm actually quite impressed with some of the problem types that show up in more advanced mathematics lessons on Khan Academy that go beyond the eighth grade level implied by current United Sta…

> that test reasoning and explanation in a non-automated way

> early experiments that take a much more interactive approach

> we're exploring strategies like peer grading

Are you guys working on any genetic / learning algorithm implementations of AI sufficient enough to evaluate responses to arbitrary prompts? It sounds both like something that should be feasible with modern tech, especially when time to response can be large (a student can wait hours for an answer to a complex essay response) and the scale can be arbitrary (as many server clusters as "its worth" yet also feasible (we can see similar scale literary processing in other spaces).

I can imagine such an algorithmic implementation where you take some common query given to students across hundreds of schools, with all the teacher graded responses, and maybe after a few years it can get within an accuracy confidence threshold to start grading the prompt, and after another few years providing critique on that grade. That would be the most revolutionary educational tech since the Internet itself, even if it were pigeonholed in several years studying the same single problem for now. Sounds awesome either way.

You can even use that peer grading tech to build up a library of problem / solutions to build your causal relations table from. I just hope you guys have someone in a back room working on this, because to me it seems as real world usable computational linguistics happen more often, there arise a ton of useful applications even in the minimum case.

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