Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Khan Academy - realistically aligned by grade?

We started using Khan Academy a few weeks ago, and my daughter, age 8, just loves it. I hadn't been paying much attention until today when I looked at her level of accomplishments. I had put her in the 3rd grade level to see what she had accomplished, but it showed that she had "mastered" from 10% - 20% of 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th grade work (she was just randomly picking activities). She has even "mastered" 9% of 8th grade work. Now, this makes me doubt that Khan Academy is accurate grade-wise. What are these "masteries" really showing us?
I was using this to assess her skill sets in 3rd and 4th grade as she has been nominated by the AG teacher for single subject acceleration, and I want to know if she really knows her math work. She is currently in third grade.
Thanks!!

I haven't looked at Khan's grade reporting, but I know with my ds8 he'll follow threads of topics how they make sense to him. It seems a pretty natural way to learn. If he has a strong interest in statistics one day he may watch videos and work on math problems through to calculating standard deviations which threaded as subjects are could show as a percent blip through to somewhere in high school.

What are these "masteries" really showing us?


Honestly?

I've looked at this as DD has attempted to use Khan as a supplemental instructional tool.

IMO, most of the "mastery" doesn't necessarily represent actual "mastery" the way that I think about it because of the way that assessments are structured and offered via Khan.

So that's strike one, IMO, in terms of using the software itself to evaluate what a student truly has mastery over...

secondly, recognize that the way that math is taught now, there is spiraling. I'd expect that a 2nd grader with complete mastery of 2nd grade WILL have mastered about 10% of what is on offer through 6th grade-- meaning, in each year's topics-- because of that spiraling.

I noticed this in jumping around and playing with it to see how good the software was; I could "relearn" things that I probably never really "learned" the way Khan apparently "teaches" them-- trig topics, for example, or those in stats that use different notation-- in a VERY short amount of time simply through trial and error on those assessments. That is so not to say that I have "mastery" over those topics, however. I couldn't tell you HOW to use the equation of a parabola to determine what its graph should look like to save my life-- truly-- but that topic shows that I've "mastered" it, because I was able to "pass" five questions in a row through raw trial and error discovery.

Now, I don't know whether that is entirely relevant here, since I'm an adult, and my LOG is similar to most of the kids around here, plus I've obviously had all of those topics previously-- it's just been 35+ years or so in that particular case...

but still, it makes me think that being able to USE the concepts isn't what Khan is actually measuring, even if they think that they are. KWIM?

I wouldn't really worry too much about this at the K-6 level, though. Not with an HG+ kiddo-- they'll learn to fill in whatever gaps they have in a hurry, IMO, up until high school level at least.

@ greenlotus — Interesting, thanks for sharing your experience.

We have some thoughts about Khan Academy here (http://info.cognitomentoring.org/wiki/Khan_Academy), but they're geared toward high school students rather than elementary school students (in particular, we don't know as much about better resources for elementary school students ). We agree with HowlerKarma that it's easy to learn to answer questions on Khan Academy correctly without understanding the material. ALEKS seems to test for mastery better than Khan Academy does, because the questions are more heterogeneous.

Feel free to be in touch if you'd like – I have experience teaching gifted elementary school students math, and earned a PhD in math as well, and so may be able to offer helpful pointers.

Email: cognitomentoring@gmail.com

Thank you for the links. Khan Academy certainly stirs up a lot of emotion. Reading the Huffington Post comments was interesting!
As I stated, I am trying to get a handle on my child's knowledge of Common Core standards so I can have some ammo when I face the principal and ask for a more challenging education. I know my child's IQ, Cogat scores, and Iowa scores, but schools are all about Common Core. I did find a website, IXL, which seems to have a test that a child can take which would assess a child's knowledge of CC math standards by grade. I am going to check that out when I have the chance.

I think with Khan Academy, if a kid answers about 2 questions correctly on a topic, it considers them "mastered". I would take it with a grain of salt. DD has done it a few times and took the placement test, and then started doing the lessons in the order that it gave her. It was jumping around all over the place. One question would be "find the perimeter of this square" and then the next question would be something from high school alegebra. Since the placement test she took had a total of about 20 questions, I don't think it is a good instrument to use to find out what level they are at or what they should be working on. ALEKS is probably better in terms of having an "assessment" but you have to pay for it and I don't think it has any instructional videos like Khan Academy does (someone correct me if I'm wrong). With Khan Academy, I told DD that the next time she does it she should go into the fourth grade level and do things in order (skipping things she already knows), rather than skipping around all over the place from one grade level to the next randomly or doing it in the order that they throw things at her.

Programs like this have a lot of limitations but the fact of the matter is that when it comes down to it, I have a choice between trying to teach DD these concepts myself, or allowing Mr. Khan to do it for me. Her teacher isn't teaching math above a third grade level and she already has the third grade math curriculum mastered. He is much better than I am. If she gets stuck then I am there to try to help, but with the higher level math I am pretty useless and have to scream for Dh to come help (he majored in math).

We have a subscription to IXL but I have never seen a placement test on it. It does give info about what skills the child is proficient in as they do the lessons but that's pretty much it, as far as I know. So if a child masters 2 digit multiplication with regrouping, as an example, and they finish the lesson or get enough correct, it will consider that skill mastered. I think this is what they mean by the program assessing or monitoring progress.

http://www.ixl.com/standards/common-core/math/grade-3
This is the page I saw. I have not checked it closely at all so if anyone has experience with it, I would love to hear about it!

The skills that they have are aligned to common core (or possibly the specific state standards as some states did not adopt common core), but I don't think there's a placement test or assessment. It's pretty much up to the parent or kid to decide what the kid should work on.

sorry, i haven't read the entire thread but wonder if this view would be helpful to you; https://www.khanacademy.org/commoncore/map

also, it is 5 correct in a row to 'master' a topic last a saw...

We used ixl for awhile. It's kind of like a big on-line workbook. You can flip page by page in perpetuity and work on exercises, but I never felt like anything was ever mastered. You can also easily get out of "learning sequence". I found it was best as additional practice on skills or a way to differentiate homework. It didn't work for us as a stand alone curriculum.