Hello KA, although I find your site MOST helpful when I know exactly what my student needs to practice, I am at odds when it comes to assessing my adult students who have gaps upon gaps I'm their math learning. Do you provide a tool that can assess where my students can restart their math studies?
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Hi Marilyn,
I teach senior secondary mathematics in Australia and my students usually start with scattered gaps that go back a very long way through their schooling. The best approach I've found to help students find these gaps is to do the "World of Math" mission and just do the mastery challenges.
It starts off with the extremely easy material (counting to 5) but rapidly moves on with only one question per skill (several skills for some questions) so progress is very rapid through well-understood material. This will lead students through all of primary (elementary) school mathematics within a few hours (broken into whatever size chunks work for you). This is also a way to refresh long-forgotten number sense and arithmetic skills.
Along the way, gaps will become apparent when some questions are not easy to complete. At this point, learning the skills is usually quickly achieved through a video, hint or real-world explanation from someone who can help out.
Progress will slow rapidly once the material reaches the final level that was well-learned at school (about year 8 level for many adults) and individuals can decide how much further they wish to continue.
Hope that helps.
Hi Chris,
Your reply was most helpful and I thank you for taking the time to explain your reasoning. One of the reasons I don't normally post to message boards is due to the number of suggestions that haven't been thought out in regards to the question. But this time I have been rewarded with the right information!
I like your description of 'scattered gaps'. That is a concept that has been difficult for me to communicate to my superiors. Your term is concise and fits the bill.
But the main reason that 'scattered gaps' is important is that not every student has the same gaps! That's what has made Khan useless to my adult students. There is no way I can assign 6th grade math to my adult students who still struggle with fractions.
Your idea about the "World of Math' as a preassessment tool sounds like it will be a good starting point for my students, so they will be more receptive to the lessons based on what they themselves struggle with not what grade level they are pegged to.
Thanks for your insight and feedback!
Ginny
The World of Math mastery is SO BIG. I think that may be too much too soon. I also think the programming has changed so your suggestion maybe won't be relevant anymore. Are Ginny, and Chris still on here? Can you speak to how well this worked for you?
I have started a student with the arithmetic challenge and will move on to the pre-algebra from there or algebra basics. I am not so much worried about pre-assessment I just want to have a curriculum track with only the relevant skills. We have another testing tool from the state to help with preassessment. Students can always do the mastery challenge and move through faster or slower than their fellow students.
Thanks for any more feedback that is out there for this quesiton.
Michelle Brzezowski
zmichelle.bailey, I'm not actively using Khan Academy for teaching maths these days but still got an email notification of your post so I'm back briefly :-)
As far as I can tell, Khan Academy has continued its path of deleting the most useful features that supported the original vision of mastery learning. They have now removed missions entirely so the "world of math" exists only as a page summarising all the class levels. Each class level seems to still have a "mastery challenge" but there is no overarching mastery challenge that spans multiple year levels. If this is the case then I can totally understand your reaction to world of math being SO BIG. Stepping through each year level in order can still be done but is now more tedious than it used to be.
There are two ways that I can see to answer your question - one or both could miss your intent so apologies in advance if I do.
1. If you want to "roll your own" list of individual skills, I have found the best/only way to do this is to maintain an external document (I use Google Docs) that lists the skills in the order that you require and have each one link directly to the relevant Khan Academy lesson. This gets students working on the skills that you require but is now much harder than it used to be to get progress data back out about these skills. Again, Khan Academy removed an extremely useful tool for this (Skills Grid)
2. The original question asked about identifying gaps in adult learners. For adults and most secondary students, these gaps are often scattered back through their schooling and are unique to each student. I would be very cautious starting a student at too high a level as skills they struggle with at this level might actually be due to gaps that are actually quite a few steps earlier. Arithmetic and pre-algebra may not provide the granularity required to identify the "first gap" that you really need to start at for your student.
Again, Khan Academy is a dried husk of what it was when they started removing the best tools in 2016-2017 Now they are just a free clone of every other ed-tech offering out there :-(
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