What Students Do (And Don't Do) in Khan Academy
blog.mrmeyer.com
What Students Do (And Don't Do) in Khan Academy
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Re: What Students Do (And Don't Do) in Khan Academy
#2Reading 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.
Re: What Students Do (And Don't Do) in Khan Academy
#3The 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 lessons. I've even had some off-site email interaction with Khan Academy developers after threads here in which I have "met" them while we discuss our common interest in mathematics education. I certainly hope that Khan Academy staff will join the discussion of this post.
The author also writes, "I find it more likely that Khan Academy’s exercise set draws an accurate map of the strengths and weaknesses of education technology in 2014. Khan Academy asks students to solve and calculate so frequently, not because those are the mathematical actions mathematicians and math teachers value most, but because those problems are easy to assign with a computer in 2014." I think this statement is correct. The Khan Academy developers have devoted a lot of thought to how 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 States curriculum standards. But the author's point is well taken that the Common Core, and good mathematics curricula around the world, expect reasoning and explanation from pupils in mathematics lessons already at elementary school age. That currently is indeed difficult to automate.
The author's comments on development of Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBC) as a new platform of online mathematics instruction is of course especially interesting. I will be curious to see how this program continues to develop, and I would be glad to hear from developers of that program in this thread too.
(Disclosure: I am a teacher of voluntary-participation prealgebra mathematics classes to advanced pupils of third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade age, using the Art of Problem Solving prealgebra textbook by Rusczyk, Patrick, and Boppana as a core text with many supplementary materials from around the world. I do not view Khan Academy as a competitor to my classes, but rather as a helpful supplement for many mathematics learners around the world. My daughter, who is of a younger age than eighth-grade age, is currently doing many of the same Khan Academy lessons as those just reviewed by the blog post author. I recommend Khan Academy to my friends, and it will probably stay in the mix for the mathematics studies of my three minor children for quite a few years yet.)
Re: What Students Do (And Don't Do) in Khan Academy
#4Please 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 academy to publicly state this is NOT a goal of theirs. Being good at math and passing math tests are orthogonal* concepts. In my experience teaching to the test is the fastest way to kill the love of any subject because, at the end of the day, the only answer you can give to the question "Why is this important? or "Why should we do it this way?" is "Because the test says so." It's death to independent thought.
I don't know who his advisor is but please kill this dissertation before it gets out into the world and he uses it for self promotion on Good Morning America.
*intentional hyperbole
Re: What Students Do (And Don't Do) in Khan Academy
#5Please 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 work at Khan Academy.)
We have no interest in preparing students for tests just for the sake of it, but if you look at the Common Core standards you'll see that they are well thought out (really!) and designing a curriculum around them is a very sensible thing to do. Of course, we won't restrict ourselves to the material covered by the Common Core if/when we feel there are gaps.
We're interested in helping students learn to solve problems, not in teaching them how to take tests.
Re: What Students Do (And Don't Do) in Khan Academy
#6I 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.
Re: What Students Do (And Don't Do) in Khan Academy
#7The 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 States curriculum standards.
Thank you.
> Common Core, and good mathematics curricular around the world, expect reasoning and explanation from pupils in mathematics lessons already at elementary school age. That currently is indeed difficult to automate.
This is definitely true. By no means is Khan Academy a complete solution for mathematics instruction, nor is it likely to become one in the next few years. Our site should ideally be used alongside other materials that test reasoning and explanation in a non-automated way, as well as projects that allow students to apply their knowledge. We have early experiments that take a much more interactive approach to teaching certain concepts and encourage more experimentation, but we're probably years away from developing them into a shipping product.
> The author's comments on development of Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBC) as a new platform of online mathematics instruction is of course especially interesting. I will be curious to see how this program continues to develop, and I would be glad to hear from developers of that program in this thread too.
If I'm not mistaken, many of the SBAC problems (especially free-response ones) are hand-graded, which can work if you charge for each test taken, but can't work for us when we have millions of problems done every day, all graded automatically. That said, we're exploring strategies like peer grading in other subject areas (particularly our programming curriculum) and would be excited to bring them to math as well.
Re: What Students Do (And Don't Do) in Khan Academy
#8I 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
Re: What Students Do (And Don't Do) in Khan Academy
#9Reading 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.
Every field has its own jargon. It's shorthand for commonly understood ideas that you don't want to waste a paragraph reiterating in common English. Just consider how computer programming talk looks to an outsider.
Re: What Students Do (And Don't Do) in Khan Academy
#10Reading 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:
"Distinguishing pointers and data on the heap is the first problem any garbage collector needs to solve. The GC needs to follow pointers in order to discover live objects. Most garbage collection algorithms can migrate objects from one part of memory to another (to reduce fragmentation and increase locality), so we also need to be able to rewrite pointers without disturbing plain old data."
I think the article is an excellent piece of technical writing, but it would also be reasonable to say "the professional compiler engineer dialect of English is not very approachable to the layman."
That said, good communicators need to be able to change their presentation based on the audience, and it's too bad that the people at the meeting you mention couldn't find a common vocabulary.
If you want to see something by the author of this post that is pitched at the layman, he made a very nice TedX presentation a few years ago:
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover?...