High School Students doing Missions in Pre-Algebra and Algebra I

Jerry,

I use Khan Academy for remediation of skills and I have had a lot of success using Khan Academy.  I have used it in several situations.  I will give you the short version

1 - assign certain skills that they must master and use it as a homework grade --- grades are some motivation

2.- assign a number of skills that have to be mastered by a date.  Last quarter was 50 but most did 125 plus on their own.  I have students who have become addicted to the site and are trying to get 100% in all of the algebra 1 and below subjects.  

3 - I started a class with prek-2 mastery at 100% so that they could learn the program, have some fun and feel some success.  The ones who were goofy about "oh this is easy stuff" made simple mistakes and had to "count the spotted cows in the field not all of the cows in the field."  It was comical but they learned to pay attention to instructions and details.  I have assigned this class to complete 5th grade by the end of this term.  They work at home or during rare downtime in class or come in at lunch.  They seem to enjoy Khan.  It will get a lot harder for them but I am able to find struggling areas in elementary math (fractions mainly)

I have a form that I use for grades below.   You will see two different students - both in control of their destiny.  One did not achieve the goal of 50 mastery and one who did.  Also, they control the number of level 1, 2, mastery etc.  The more mastery's and less in any other level the better the test grade.  

Best wishes on your success in using Khan Academy in the classroom.  

Susie Brown

Jerry, 

I forgot one thing:  POINT CHALLENGE

students compete for the highest points.  This is harder to control what areas that they get points from (video, Prek-2, etc..)  but it is fun to watch them push each other.  There is a lot of learning going on             whether it is review or new skills.  

Susie

Jerry,

I am doing this with my students although it's a little less-stressful with year 8 and 9 students who are behind because they have smaller gaps and more time to catch up.

My basic approach is to use KA to rapidly identify the unique mix of gaps each kid has. The 20-40hr commitment is for someone who actually needs to learn all the content. Your students probably have most of the content already and can do the remaining content in far less time.

The key to success here seems to be to maximise the time that students spend working on their individual gap areas. KA is set up to help you with this because if you get something, you can easily get the 5 correct answers in a row to complete a practice exercise. After an initial few hours (maximum) of rapidly completing exercises in existing knowledge, students will then have to spend most of their time working (relatively) slowly through the skills that they didn't have to start with.

Where this gets potentially tricky is when the students' gaps go much deeper than the Pre-Algebra and Algebra content (as is often the case). For these students, you will need to recommend earlier and earlier content that they missed. In my case, many students have understanding gaps that go all the way back to early primary (elementary) school. This prerequisite understanding is not included in the 20-40 hours mission length calculation.

Motivation is a personal thing and will vary between students. I try very hard to promote intrinsic over extrinsic motivation. I completely ignore the points system and mostly ignore the badges in KA although the students sometimes like them. I focus on time spend on the system and progress. Simply seeing and explicitly acknowledging the time that students spend practicing maths is powerful motivation for some students as they have become used to teachers not knowing or even believing the hours they spend working at home from a textbook.

More powerful that the time spent is the visibility of progress in the system. My students overwhelmingly arrive with a firm belief that they can't actually learn maths. There are a range of reasons for this but showing them the KA skill practice chart showing their improvement in speed and accuracy of a skill is powerful. Because maths skills (more than most other subjects) switch from "impossible" to "obvious" when you learn them, students often forget how far they have progressed. These graphs are a highly-motivating reminder that their work has been productive.

Beyond the carrot, I also have the stick approach. Because KA gives me data of time spent on practice I sometimes have to specifically remind individual students (and sometimes their parents) of the practice requirement and their failure to do enough practice. The data I get blocks the usual comeback of "but I did do X hours of homework last week, I just didn't get many questions done in that time"

All the best with it. Senior students can be much more set in their ways.

Hello Jerry! My name is Lisa Krueger and I am a Khan Academy Ambassador teaching in Chicago. You have gotten some great advice from fellow users, but I would like to add one more. If your students take the NWEA test then you can use the new site KA launch to pair KA and NWEA to help fill in the gaps in a student's learning. I've included a link to the site below as well as the google slides presentation. Hopefully it helps. Thank you for posting!

https://www.khanacademy.org/mappers 

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1iG7q3EYZHwlA2v2WNuW3b3-M1Ov9zPOZ1m6kq5Sjmc4/edit#slide=id.g17ff9725aa_0_0 

Lots of great responses here. I don't have a whole class, but an individual student, and I had her do a diagnostic assessment to identify which skills she did and didn't have. She's in grade 6 but in some skills had gaps from grade 3, while in other areas was up to date. The diagnostic test I used (http://www.letsgolearn.com/) then created a personalised lesson plan linked to Khan Academy lessons. I can work with the student at exactly the right level, or she can work through them at her own pace, as well as doing Mastery Challenges to level up. Her whole attitude towards maths is changing - from hating maths and feeling stupid to not minding it and being pleased with her own progress.

Some teachers do the same diagnostic test with a whole class, and then will teach in small groups based on what skills the specific group of students need to learn, while other students who know that skill work individually on their lesson plan. 

It's not the same as traditional teaching, because kids spend all their time working to their own level, rather than wasting some time going over stuff they already know and wasting some time being confused by stuff that is too hard because of gaps in prerequisite knowledge, etc. It's a more highly targeted approach, and as others mentioned kids can also do extra hours outside of class time.