I know it is a hard pill to swallow that such a pedagogical luddite such as Sal Khan is having such a broad and important impact on learning when the professionals are struggling mightily.
Maybe, just maybe, he's on to something that despite years of institutional training 'real' teachers are missing.
Maybe it's important for a student to be able to interact with a lesson over and over again in order to catch a key point they might have missed the first pass.
Maybe it's important for a student to be able to ask other students how they caught on to something on their time scale and in a way that is pseudo-anonymous.
Maybe what makes Khan a great teacher is his breadth and depth of knowledge and context thanks to being a triple undergrad from MIT with backgrounds in math, computer science, and electrical engineering AND a Harvard MBA.
Maybe the institution of teaching is due for an evolutionary shake-up and Khanacademy is it[or at least a taste of things to come].
You make great points, and much of what you say is absolutely true. But I have dealt with pupils who have severely broken concepts of decimal place, and whose potential for understanding basic arithmetic has been damaged beyond repair.[0]
I believe the KA is doing brilliant things, and opening up knowledge for all is fantastic. I would just like to be convinced that modern research about pedagogy is being integrated rather than ignored. The evidence suggests it isn't, and I very much look forward to the day when it is, so this resource becomes even better.
And lest you think that I am one of the ones feeling threatened, I'm not. I'm not a teacher, but I do go out and give presentations for the purpose of enrichment and enhancement. As such I am often asked to consult on questions of tutoring both the most able and the least able, and because of that I work closely with those active in pedagogy research.
[0] I can't, of course, say that the damage was irreparable, but despite many hours of effort, I and several colleagues found no way to dissuade the student that 0.35 was bigger than 0.4, no matter what we tried.
I think if I could ever have understood the difficulty, I would've had a chance of working around it. The problem seemed to be that they could place things on the number line, see that this was to the right of that, say that 0.4 was to the right of 0.35, say that hence 0.4 was bigger than 0.35, and then go right back to doing what they had always done.
My model of what was happening in the student's head is illustrated by this. A survey was conducted asking people:
A. Which is true:
(a) The Sun goes round the Earth.
or
(b) The Earth goes round the Sun.
?
B. How long does it take?
Of those people who gave the answer to A as (b), over 80% answered B with "a day" or "24 hours" or something equivalent. In short, they got the "right" answer to A, and then a completely disconnected and obviously "wrong" answer to B.
In this case I think people are answering A by reciting a fact they learned when young. We are told that the Earth goes round the Sun, so that's what people recount. By they don't connect that with their personal experience. Their personal experience is seeing the Sun going overhead. They "know" that the Sun goes round the Earth, and that it takes a day. They're told the Earth goes round the Sun, and that's what they parrot for question A, but when asked B, they answer from their own personal experience of seeing the Sun go overhead.
And that takes a day.
So I think the student could follow the things they had been told, and they could recite, parrot fashion, all the "right" things that would get them the marks on the test designed specifically to assess their knowledge of decimals places, and then when they had to put it into action, they fell back on what they felt things looked like, and were driven by their intuition and experience.
Which was completely wrong.
So that's my "theory" of where the disconnect lay. But maybe I'm wrong, because I certainly never fixed it.
I know that when I'm debugging a piece of code, and I get an idea in my head about how it works or should work, and that idea is shown to be wrong by clear and incontrovertible evidence, it can still take between a few hours and a few days for me to stop thinking it.
A number line doesn't help some students decompose numbers. The key insight in this example is noticing that 0.35 is "3 tenths and 5 hundredths", in addition to being "35 hundredths". The former is a decomposition. Number line approaches more commonly rely on students being able to think of 0.4 as 0.40, which some interpret as an arbitrary rule, rather than as related to facts about equivalent fractions.
The particular approach offered by the Rational Number Project in the article I linked to in the original post focuses kids on that decomposition from the very beginning using area models and colors to highlight multiple ways of seeing (e.g.) 0.35
> Sal Khan is having such a broad and important impact on
> learning when the professionals are struggling mightily.
Are you sure he is having such borad and important impact?
Are you sure that he won't fail at exactly the same spot where "professionals are struggling mightily"? Do you know the reasons they are struggling?
> great teacher is his breadth and depth of knowledge and context thanks
> to being a triple undergrad from MIT with backgrounds in math, computer
> science, and electrical engineering AND a Harvard MBA.
Nothing in the list makes anyone a great teacher. You may have all the knowledge in the world and be a lousy teacher. What makes a great teacher is the skill of kindling the interest in the subject in your students and then having the skill to transfer you knowledge effectively. Khan Academy has none of that. It is just another attempt to solve the problem by throwing technology at it. The thing is, problem has little to do with technology. And Khan Academy has little of understanding ot that.
>I know it is a hard pill to swallow that such a pedagogical luddite such as Sal Khan is having such a broad and important impact on learning when the professionals are struggling mightily.
How are we quantifying Khan Academy's "broad and important impact" on learning? If someone learns from the KA videos, what do they typically accomplish afterwards?
That is a poor way to quantify the quality of an educational product. While quality can and sometimes does drive demand for a product it's frequently possible for demand to be driven instead by fads, trends, and hype.
If you want to measure the quality of something there are far more reliable metrics to use than demand.
With that said I like Kahn Academy. This is a single issue in a large body of educational materials. This one problem doesn't mean the qualify of the full product is bad just that is has room for improvement.
If we assume that students are rational actors making decisions between traditional teaching methods and KA...and we assume that KA, students, and teachers all have the same end goal of teaching the kids the material.
It sure looks like, at an increasing rate, kids are choosing KA. After all they are held most directly accountable for their academic success or failure. Wouldn't demand then be a reasonable gauge of value?
Students cannot possibly evaluate which of the teaching methods are better because they do not yet know what they are supposed to be taught. This lack of knowledge is a fundamental problem of markets in education.
Students might say that method A "feels better" or "is more fun" than method B. However, it is entirely possible that method A is worse because, in the end, students will actually not have learned what they would learn with method B.
This is not to say that students' opinions are irrelevant. After all, when students don't enjoy what they're doing, they will often block out the lesson and not learn anything due to the lack of fun.
Still, it is pretty absurd to think that students could ever be objective in evaluating the teaching methods they are subjected to.
> Students cannot possibly evaluate which of the teaching methods are better because they do not yet know what they are supposed to be taught. . . . it is pretty absurd to think that students could ever be objective in evaluating the teaching methods they are subjected to.
It's easy to recognize good teachers. They are first, understandable and second, motivating. If a teacher is not readily understood, or if they do not motivate the student to learn, then they are not very good. Children as well adults naturally use these metrics to evaluate not just teachers, but communicators in general.
It's easy to evaluate a Teacher by those metrics but that does not guarantee that the content the teacher is teaching is correct or accurate. Thus my point above.
The best way to ensure good content is to ensure smart teachers, which is what these metrics are designed for.
Fractions and decimals are not difficult. I doubt that kids who have been learning math with Khan have problems understanding them. But ìf Khan has been a little unclear for some percentage of students, the addition of a few exercises should solve the problem. The lacunae of a smart teacher are easily fixed, unlike the confusion caused by a teacher who doesn't understand the material.
> But ìf Khan has been a little unclear for some percentage of students, the addition of a few exercises should solve the problem.
You must realize that this is an incredibly simplistic view of learning? How students learn is an extremely complicated process. While decimals are not difficult, understanding exactly where students struggle with the concept and determining a sequence of learning activities to help them overcome that concept is extremely difficult.
Your assumptions don't account for whether the content being taught is correct or not. Goals and rational actors notwithstanding one of the most relevant metrics here is the correctness of the content being taught and that is something the student is not capable of assessing. As a result student demand is no indicator of quality of the content. It may be an indicator of the quality of the learning experience but that should not be conflated with the quality of the content.
Qualifications that are easy to obtain are often in higher demand than those that are harder. And yet the harder qualification may be of more benefit, more highly valued by potential employers, and bestow greater learning.
Demand is not an indicator of quality or value.
If you think popularity is an indicator of quality, this is an interesting read:
There are comments of other students who watched that video. These comments are questions and answers about what was discussed. There are also links to exercises covering the content. Each lecture is arranged in a logical order for each topic. There are capabilities to integrate the video lectures and exercise with real-world classes and ways for teachers to track their students progress and the areas where each student is struggling is highlighted.
It's phenomenal and worth closer inspection if any of this is news to you.
Maybe, just maybe, he's on to something that despite years of institutional training 'real' teachers are missing.
Maybe it's important for a student to be able to interact with a lesson over and over again in order to catch a key point they might have missed the first pass.
Maybe it's important for a student to be able to ask other students how they caught on to something on their time scale and in a way that is pseudo-anonymous.
Maybe what makes Khan a great teacher is his breadth and depth of knowledge and context thanks to being a triple undergrad from MIT with backgrounds in math, computer science, and electrical engineering AND a Harvard MBA.
Maybe the institution of teaching is due for an evolutionary shake-up and Khanacademy is it[or at least a taste of things to come].