My teacher has us do Khan Academy practice problems. She counts this as 70% of our grade. If we master them we will get an extra point for each mastered skill. Mastering sometimes 20+ skills is hard, because the mastery challenges will stop and make you wait for 15 hours. There should be a way for coaches to set skills for students to master and not make them wait forever.
Hi Donaa210!
I'm a Khan Academy Ambassador and I've volunteered in six schools, coached about 1400 students, grades 2-12. I'm here to tell you that making students wait 16 hours until they can "level up" a skill with a Mastery Challenge is EXACTLY the right thing to do.
Here's the thing: even though you're doing the same type of skill during a practice session as you are during a Mastery Challenge, it's measuring a different thing. During a practice session, Khan is testing to see if you can get 5 out of 7 correct (typically), if you do the same sort of problem over and over again. If you can, great! You've gone from "Needs Practice" to "Practiced".
But then you have to wait -- typically until the next day -- and take a Mastery Challenge where you get ONE CHANCE to level up the skill. You've shown that you can do the work when you're doing a bunch of the same type of problems, one after another -- now, can you do it on a different day, when you have just ONE chance? If you get it wrong -- boom, back down to "Needs Practice". Why? Because if you don't remember how to do the problem the next day, you still need practice.
But if you've truly mastered the skill, then it shouldn't be a problem to get it right, on your first try, on a different day. And on the day after that. And a week later. And a month later. That's what mastery means. It's not just that you can get the problems right, it's that you can set the concept aside for a few days, come back to it and still crush it.
So your strategy should be to do Mastery Challenges to level up skills in addition to practice new skills. If you were to learn two new skills per day and do a Mastery Challenge or two each day, then you'd always have a pipeline of skills moving towards mastery. You'd move yesterday's newly practiced skills up to Level One, you'd move the two skills from the day before up to Level Two, and the two skills from the day before that up to Mastered. That'd give you two newly mastered skills each day, and THAT is an easy A. :-)
Good luck!
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