Uninterrupted Continuous Practice

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for writing in with your ideas regarding the implementation of continuous practice at Khan Academy! We are always working to add features that improve our site, and we love getting input from our community.

I've passed your feedback along to the team and it will be part of our conversation as we plan the future of Khan Academy. Thanks again for your interest in improving Khan Academy :)

All the best,

Alex

There is the idea that you could unlock continuous practice once you are at least at Proficient level or higher and have this be separate from the proficiency level, allowing people to try to improve their speed and accuracy without fear of failure effecting their mastery level.

Having continual practice would also be useful for groups of problems, for instance after they are proficient in all practices in a quiz group they can unlock continuous practice with problems like those that would be on that quiz.

Additionally once someone has mastered all practices in a unit, they unlock the ability to do continuous practice for that unit. The same with the courses, if someone masters all practices in a grade level, then they could unlock continuous practice for that course.

The other issue I have with the current system, is that it disincentives practice once mastery has been achieved. If someone wants to practice a subject they finished a while ago, then they will have to worry about messing up their proficiency levels by doing so. Even if it is easy to restore, it causes discomfort from the loss which teaches them to associate that feeling with practicing old subjects.

The badges are a good method for encouraging practice, but they do not seem to be very prominent and the current practice structure seems to be disjointed from the function of the badges. For instance Nice Streak requires the user to go through multiple practice sessions after they max their available mastery level for doing that skill. With only a small notification on the side with the badges hidden away in the profile page which is separated from the main content, they are not as effective as they could be.

The current layout seems rather well made for teaching someone new material I just feel that trying to polish an old subject is frustrating using this format. An example of a format that I found to be useful for polishing my skills would be thatquiz.org, but their site is rather bare bones with many fewer subjects and it is much harder to track your progress.

The ability to set a number of problems with a timer and a record of percent correct allows for better measurement of current ability in the subject. If this site had that sort of function then there could be a record of the fastest time for completing a set number of problems in each subject with 100 percent accuracy, as well as a record of longest streak.

Thatquiz is excellent for drills, but it doesn’t have the breadth and depth khan does.

The oldest KA I remember had webs and mastery challenges. It allowed a student to visually see how different skills linked together as prerequisites for the next skill. The best thing about the old mastery challenges was that it would cover anything and EVERYTHING that a student had practiced on khan. It didn’t matter if a skill was mastered over two years before, it could come up at any time on a mastery challenge.

I homeschool. Doing 2 mastery challenges per day as review was a requirement. I would LOVE to see it come back, even if only in single subject options (ie. a high school student may have long division pop up).

I was thinking about this again the other day.  One of the older videos is still up, and my 4th grader wanted to know what the thing in the upper corner was, since the page was so different from the way it is now.

Turns out that it was the older "Get x number right in a row" rather than the current question batch.  I LOVED those as a teacher, because it was really easy to see who wanted to skip the video and go straight to the lesson (the first 1-5 would be wrong, until they caught on).  On the other hand, there were a bunch of people who complained that it took too long to create a new streak if you got one wrong due to just a typo.

+1000 to this. I came back to KA after a few years away, and the biggest thing I miss is the "Get x right in a row" format for practice questions. An account-level option to go back to this format would be great, though I'd be perfectly happy with a reset button that let you easily start over from question 1.

As it stands now it's frustrating to make a silly mistake on the first question, get the next three right, and then be forced to start over. I'm not sure why it was changed from the old system, but the new system feels like it's punishing you for wrong answers.

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