Khan for Educators: Course Mastery

Hi, I'm Megan from Khan Academy, and in this video, we're going to explore Khan Academy's course mastery system. At Khan Academy, we're devoted to mastery learning and build our content around our course mastery system.

However, a question we hear frequently from teachers is: What exactly do we mean by course mastery? On Khan Academy, course mastery is a feature that allows teachers to set and track long-term learning goals for students while encouraging students to work at their own pace. Currently, course mastery is available for courses with full practice content, including all of our math courses, such as AP Calculus A/B, B/C, AP Statistics, and our "Get Ready for Grade Level" courses, as well as Grammar, High School Biology, AP Biology, AP Physics 1, U.S. Government and Civics, AP U.S. Government and Politics, U.S. History, AP U.S. History, World History, Project Origins, AP Macroeconomics, Microeconomics, AP Microeconomics, and AP Computer Science Principles.

Assigning course mastery goals allows teachers to set and track long-term goals. Let's walk through how to assign course mastery goals to your students. When you log into Khan Academy, you'll land on the teacher dashboard. Click on the name of the class you want to assign a mastery goal. On the left-hand side navigation, go to the Course Mastery Placement tab. If you haven't done so already, add the on-grade level course you currently teach, and if you're a math teacher, add the "Get Ready for Grade Level" course.

If you're about to start the school year, we recommend assigning the "Get Ready for Grade Level" course as a course mastery goal to have students begin the year by gap filling and strengthening fundamentals before diving into on-grade level skills. For example, if I'm a 5th grade teacher, I would start the year by assigning the "Get Ready for 5th Grade" course. Click the blue button to add these courses. Now you'll be on the Course Mastery Placement page. Click "Assign Goal."

You can confirm you assigned the desired goals to students by selecting Course Mastery Placement on the left-hand panel, and you will now see the current mastery goals assigned to students in your class. As students work on Khan Academy, you can also add additional courses for students to work on, either below or above grade level. You can assign the same course for all students to master, or you can assign different courses to individuals or groups of students.

We recommend using Khan Academy's Skill Report to look more closely at students' progress and determine the best goal or goals for each student. Now, let's look a little closer at what students see in terms of course mastery goals. When students log into Khan Academy, they will be on their learner home page. Each student will be able to see their teacher or class name on the left-hand side.

By clicking on the class, students will see their mastery goal. A student can click the goal at any time and continue from where they left off to make progress toward their goal. Students can continue working toward their mastery goal on the iOS and Android apps as well. Every skill or concept has multiple mastery levels, and students earn additional points with each new level.

There are several ways for students to practice. They can practice a single concept at a time on an exercise, or they can practice a mix of different concepts on a quiz, unit test, course challenge, or mastery challenge. As students get questions right, they move up from "Not Started" to "Familiar" to "Proficient." The top level is "Mastered." Students can only get to "Mastered" by getting to "Proficient" and then getting that concept right on a unit test, course challenge, or mastery challenge.

Most teachers recommend having students start with the course challenge or specific unit tests within the course. This way, both students and teachers can quickly identify gaps and strengths in student knowledge in order to provide the right content and right support at the right moment. When students are stuck or miss questions, their mastery level moves down and a symbol appears next to the concept to help them remember where to focus.

If students are consistently missing problems about a concept, they'll move to "Attempted" status and a red dot will appear next to that concept. Mastery of individual concepts contributes to unit progress and to overall course progress. A mastery goal is considered achieved once a student reaches 90 percent mastery, though they can still access previous goals at any time.

Students can always see what they've completed and what they should work on next. Additionally, once students have begun working in a course, they will receive mastery challenges, which appear at the top of the course page. Mastery challenges highlight opportunities for students to engage in personalized spaced repetition of the skills students have already started practicing.

Research shows that spiraling skills over time and across lessons is a key component to minimizing student learning loss and improving knowledge retention. We'll be diving deeper into reports in a later lesson, but let's take a quick look at where to find mastery progress for students. Starting at the teacher dashboard, select a class, and select Course Mastery Progress from the left-hand panel.

This report shows student progress on the selected course. First, you'll see class progress towards overall course mastery and the median mastery for the class as a whole. Below, you'll see the mastery for each unit. Perhaps it's the start of the year and you're focusing on this first unit. By clicking on any unit, you can see the additional detail of progress for each student at the unit level, including each student's mastery progress for that unit and the class median for unit mastery progress.

Khan Academy also has a skills report found under the Activity Overview to dive deeper into the individual skills for a given course. On the skills report, you can open any unit to get a quick view of how students are progressing for the skills in that unit by looking at the purple bars on the right side. By clicking on a specific skill, you will be able to see the mastery level for every student for that skill.

If you notice that several students are struggling with a skill, you can assign extra practice on that skill right here in the skills report. We'll talk more about how to make assignments in a separate video. Some advice from teachers using Khan Academy's course mastery in their classrooms: Mastering an entire course can feel daunting to students, so break it up into checkpoints, like monthly goals.

You can also consider having students focus on particular units throughout the year, then check the unit report to see how they're doing. Also, you don't need to assign the same course mastery goal to every student to differentiate. You can assign different courses to different students. Some teachers even assign a mastery goal for a previous grade level as review at the start of the year.

We hope this video helps you get started using course mastery with your students.