Homeroom with Sal & Kristen DiCerbo

Okay standby. I realize I didn't put the links to both of these.

Hi everyone, welcome to our daily homeroom live stream! Sal here from Khan Academy. For those of you who are wondering what this is, this is our way of staying in touch. We started doing this as soon as we started having school closures, I guess this is almost three months ago now. It's a way to stay connected and have conversations that are relevant not just for education and the school closures in COVID, but frankly across a whole host of conversations. I'm looking forward to the conversation that we're going to have shortly.

I do remind everyone we are not for profit, and we are funded with philanthropic donations from folks like yourself. So, if you're in a position to do so, please think about making a donation. I want to give a special shout-out to several corporations that stepped up, especially when they saw that we were already running at a deficit and our costs have only gone up during the COVID crisis: Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, Fastly, and Novartis, and the many other philanthropists and corporate partners. We continue to run at a deficit, but this makes a huge difference. Donations of all sizes make a big difference and allow us to support folks around the world, especially those who would not be in a position to have world-class resources.

With that, I'm excited to introduce our guest, Kristen DeServio, who is Khan Academy's new Chief Learning Officer. I will remind everyone you can put your questions in the under-fate in the Facebook or the YouTube message boards, and we have team members who are going to be taking a look at that.

Kristin, great to have you here!

Thanks! I'm excited to be here.

So, what I thought we could do is I'll start just getting everyone acquainted on learning science and asking you questions there. Then, I'd love to take as many questions as possible from the message boards because in the past, we've gotten a lot of questions about what's the best way to study, and is there a modality that works or doesn't? I could obviously take stabs at some of that, but you are better qualified. So, let's just start off with a basic question, Kristen: What is learning science?

If you think about the two words there, fundamentally, it's about trying to use scientific processes, like the scientific method, to study how we learn. So, what can we find out about teaching and learning by doing research? It's actually kind of a new phrase, a new domain that we talk about, because it's not just about educational psychology or cognitive psychology. It also brings in computer science and a little anthropology, and thinking about classrooms as a whole, and also the technology that we bring in.

So, it's a lot of kind of bringing things together to think about how we can improve both educational technology but generally our teaching and learning, and what we know about it, by studying it in a little more detail in depth.

As a learning scientist—and you've done your PhD—what are some things, I mean just high-level, before we even get into some of the questions or thinking about what we're trying to do here at Khan Academy? What are some of the big ahas that you've had in your learning science career?

I think there's a few. One is let's talk about studying a little bit. Lots of people study the wrong way, in ways that aren't really helpful. So, I know I spent a lot of time in college reading books with my highlighter out and going through, and then it's time for the test and I go back and read all the things I highlighted. That's not really that effective.

Much better to read a little bit, close the book, and explain to yourself what you just read. Say, “Oh, that relates to this other thing that I know about,” and how that fits. Then, open the book back up, and once you're done, close the book again and quiz yourself! Because, in fact, what you need to do on a test is remember information, to bring information from your memory back in so that you can apply it. When you quiz yourself, that's what you're doing. If you're just reading and highlighting, that's actually not helping you do the actual thing you need to do on the test.

Lots of those things about just thinking about providing yourself explanations of what you've just read and practicing retrieving information from your memory are much better for studying than thinking about just watching things over and over again.

I know one thing that you do—go ahead.

No, no! As I say, one thing that you do in your videos a lot is you'll say, “Pause the video and try to solve this.” And I don't know how many people actually do this, but they should because, actually, that's them trying to actively do something with what you've been explaining, and that's going to help them remember it more.

No, I mean that's really interesting! In a lot of ways, you validated—I thought I was a little bit of a weird studier when I was in college and in high school because I would get frustrated. I could see friends that could kind of just power through a chapter in a dense textbook, and you're exactly right: they would highlight. And I’m like, “Oh, I wish I could be them,” because I would read three or four paragraphs and then I would kind of sit and ponder it for a little bit, and then I would go back into it. But in some ways, you've said that that's—I guess I'm doing the right thing. Learning science backs me up.

I mean, it depends on what I was pondering—I sometimes probably don't know the right things.

What are your thoughts?

Oh, actually there are a bunch of questions here from YouTube.

Suresh Jai says, "What is Khan Academy's goal and what are the best strategies for learning at night?" I could take part of that, but maybe you could start with what’s the best way... it’s related to what we're talking about. Is there anything specific about night that we should be thinking about?

The biggest things aren't really the time of day, but how much cognitive effort you have to put into something. So, if you have to study at night, you have to study at night. But the things you should do are think about how can you clear out other distractions—make sure it's quiet—so you have the most cognitive energy available to focus on the thing you need to focus on.

At the end of the day, if it's been a long day and you're kind of running on fumes, you might think about how to get a little more of that, and even if it's a 15-minute nap before you start, that can be a good thing to think about! You know, how do you get that focus back that you need?

Yeah, you know, that's very close to what I would say. And, you know, part of this fun of this conversation might be I will say things and then you will tell me whether that is, in no way, sound advice or actually, “Sal, there are three studies that say exactly what you're saying.”

But what I found, especially in college, when you had some things that were a little bit hard—I remember some of those more advanced math courses. There'd be a question and I just look at it and I was like, “I don't even know how to approach this.” I actually learned to delegate to my subconscious. I know this sounds a little bit weird, but, you know, just as if you are a manager, if you're an executive at a company, if you're a leader, you can't do everything yourself. You have to delegate to your team, and oftentimes, you don't want to micromanage your team; that's disempowering.

I realize that we all— we're kind of like this consciousness that sits on this massive computing machine, or whatever you want to call it—an inferential engine—which is our brain. I learned that if I look at the problem and I think deeply about it, I do struggle a little bit. I try to make a little headway in it, but then I go to sleep—it's eerie how I sometimes wake up in the morning and it's like a delivery of like, “Oh, this is the answer, Sal!” I was like, “Oh, thank you, subconscious! I will go write that down and take credit for it.”

Even though, even though it actually happened recently on a much more—I was like, “Who's the lead singer of the Eagles?” And I went back to the house and said, “Who's the lead singer?” Then I woke up in the morning and I was like, “Don Henley!”

So, the brain, the brain—that's definitely... you'll hear lots of people talk about also, like, “I do my best thinking when I'm walking the dog” or “when I'm in the shower,” and it's because you're kind of again not putting all of your focus on it, but letting it be kind of working in the background there. And there are lots of folks that have that same experience in different ways, whether it's sleeping or just taking a break and thinking about something else for a little while—that'll help you actually then be stronger at the thing you were targeting to do.

Right. I think so many times, you just feel like you need to power through things—not sleep, take, you know, drink caffeine. And maybe on the margin, but not really long term—is that a good thing?

Not really. Is that a good solution?

That kind of ties into the other thing that is, if there's one of the big findings that's just replicated over and over and over again, is try to space out your studying! Trying to cram it all in that night before, like you said, you might do okay on the test the next day, but if you've got to then do it on the midterm or the final, it's not going to be there anymore.

Whereas if you space it out—you use the same amount of time—you know, if you're studying for two hours a night—if instead you do 20 minutes over time each night for six nights, you're going to remember it better than if you just cram those two hours in the night before. So, that does take some planning. It does mean you've got to be a little bit more planful in your life about where you start putting things in, but we do find that learners who learn more are able to retain it for a longer period of time do that more spaced practice, we call it.

Yeah, yeah, no it's consistent! You know, you're building that habit—20 minutes a day, whatever. And to the other part of that question about what's the purpose of Khan Academy—for those who don't know, we're not for profit: our mission is to provide world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

It really is to help all of you, whether you're working independently, but ideally working in conjunction with a teacher, to have access to material that is engaging, that you can learn at your own time and pace, that teachers can understand what your needs are better, and you can fill in any gaps and really accelerate your learning. That's the elevator pitch of Khan Academy for those to that question.

This is a question from Facebook: Robin Schwartz asks, "How can we help people enjoy studying? Perhaps the same way people enjoy training for a marathon?"

Thanks from Robin, the Math Lady! Whoo! The Math Lady, I'd like to know more about what she does, but there's a number of things that you can think about that make things enjoyable or interesting or motivating. So first, in terms of motivation, we find that there's a couple things that make people find motivating. One, if you have some expectation that you're going to be successful, you're going to be more likely to do something.

That idea is that, you know, if I know if I spend three hours on this, I'm still going to fail—that's not going to motivate me to try to do this at all. So, that kind of thinking about what that is, and so this ties in a lot to what you hear about the research on growth versus fixed mindset. I know you've had Angela Duckworth on talking about grit, which is kind of a longer-term piece of this, but on the shorter term, if you think about just understanding that with practice, you can get better at all kinds of things—including math, including science.

So that expectation of success and thinking about how you frame how you talk to yourself about whether you're likely to be successful or not is one piece of it. Thinking about, “You know what? I am likely to experience success if I put some hard work into this.”

Then the second piece is adding value to it. Is this something that's valuable to you? And so things can be valuable in a lot of ways. I know just from talking to you, you are a very curious person and I think you find value just in learning new things. But other people, I think sometimes find that they need to relate to their life.

So they want to see how it's going to be related to a hobby or a job that they might need, or they want to think about how is this going to be related to thinking about another course you might be interested in taking that you need this to be able to be successful in that course.

So thinking about what is the value of this and what can it help you do and provide by learning this knowledge and skills—that's the second piece. But then Robin suggests thinking about training for a marathon. A lot of exercise training these days is actually much more about—you've got your Fitbit, you've got your graphs, you're tracking your progress, you're thinking about how you're doing, and how all of those kind of fit together.

With those pieces, we can also think about, are there ways that we can use those kinds of motivators to help make studying more enjoyable? And so at Khan, there are things like energy points that you get by watching videos; you get them by increasing your mastery on skills. You can think about charting your own progress on those skills that you've mastered and thinking about how that then builds into what you know, so you can tie in that system to also the value that you see.

So if you think those kinds of things are motivating for you to be able to kind of see your progress and work through it, those kinds of things are available to think about how you track your progress on learning over time, and things like that can help you do that.

That's super useful! And just to throw in my own two cents that are not as backed up by research, but just personal experience, which is I've said this before. You know, you could view like, “Oh, I've gotta slog through this chapter of the book and memorize some stuff,” or you could tell yourself, “We live in this mystery called the universe.”

Like, many hundreds of people's life work went into the culmination of knowledge—not the combination; it's a long journey—but the knowledge that I can now read in a textbook or get on Khan Academy or some other resource—this is powerful! I can, like, you know, Newton would have done anything to be able to read this chapter! And I get to read it now, so that's one.

And it does tell you about how the universe works. No matter, you know, we can all have our subjects that we connect with and then our subjects we're like, “Oh, I guess this is a requirement; I got it.” But if you have the opposite mindset, if you say, “No, every subject has something that is deep inside of it.”

I think about when you look at these movies or these books like Harry Potter, right? Like we all imagine going on these adventures where we encounter some book and it is cryptic and it is hard, but there are spells in that book! If you can get through the cryptic nature of it, you are going to understand something about the universe and be able to manipulate the universe in very powerful ways. And I think you could do the same things in your study. You're learning an organic chemistry mechanism; you're like, "Oh, I got to memorize the aldol reactions." No, the aldol reaction has wisdom in it! And if you really understand it, it's going to unlock other things and you're even going to be able to take it into other parts of your life.

But anyway, I think the more you always imagine yourself that you're in some form of an epic adventure—which in theory we are in this kind of who-knows-what—things become more interesting.

That’s pretty cool! And I actually have done in my past a bunch of research on games and learning. One of the key things, you know, people all the time when they think about games, think about, “Oh, we’re going to earn points and all that.” One of the things that actually is really attractive to people about playing games is the quest—the going and the searching and the seeing where the quest takes you and leads you.

And that's kind of what you're talking about, too—of the adventure of getting there.

Exactly! Exactly! And when you're—when those—whoever it is, you know, Hermione encounters some old spell book, she's like, “Oh, I got to read this!”

She’s her mind! You've got the example of the person who does like to study.

But anyway, I mean, there are a bunch of questions coming in. I mean, but I'll ask a general question relative to Khan Academy. You know, Kristin, and we've obviously talked a lot about this, but where do you think Khan Academy fits in the learning process? And, you know, related to that, on YouTube, Nikhil Govindarajan asks—says “Hi Sal,” but really “Hi both of us”—you know, “Why do you believe in the mastery approach to learning?”

So, yeah, I mean, kind of painting a picture where does Khan Academy fit in? What does it do well? Where does the in-person classroom mean a lot? What's your thoughts there?

And what is research—one of the reasons I was excited to join Khan Academy was actually because of the ways that it can serve as a supplement to everything else that goes on in the classroom.

When we think about what that means as a supplement, we want to do a couple of different things. One thing that happens with a curriculum or with a teacher teaching a classroom is sometimes the explanation just doesn't quite make sense. You don't quite get it. But having someone else explain it in a slightly different way gives you that aha moment of, “Oh yeah, now I get it!”

So that's one thing certainly with the videos that happen a lot, and it's one place to think about just getting an alternative explanation of what's going on. And then the second piece that we know is so important for learning is to be able to practice with feedback. Very often, there may be a problem set in the back of the book with the odd-numbered answers that just have the answer.

So there's this whole problem when you turn to the—you’re like, “I don’t know how to do this!” You turn to the back of the book and it says “62.” You're like, “I don't know what to make of that!”

Khan Academy provides both the ability to have additional practice but also to have some supports in doing it—so having some hints to get you unstuck and then once you get to an answer, giving you feedback about whether that was right and why or why not it was right.

So that's really important to the learning process.

The bigger question is then that all of that fits into this idea of mastery learning, which I know you've explained on various times, but for folks that aren't familiar, is the idea that you work on mastering or getting up to proficiency on a given piece of knowledge or skill before you keep going on to the next one.

In most of our traditional education, you just move forward to the next skill and next skill whether you've mastered the last one or not, and we end up with kind of these holes in learning.

What we can do with mastery learning is say we're going to focus instead of making sure you go all—everyone in lockstep and say we're going to make sure you master this skill, and then we'll go on to the next skill and the next skill.

The research behind that is that that leads to large impacts on learning. This is actually something that particularly in the 70s and the 80s was studied extensively—like hundreds of studies.

There are studies that try to summarize all of those studies, and they consistently find that that effect of mastering something, getting tested, saying, “Do I know this?” If I don’t, I go back and learn it more deeply, and then test again. And then when I'm ready to go on, that sequence is really powerful and leads to large impacts on learning outcomes.

What’s your sense, given that there is this fairly large body of research—I think there are few things with that much data backing it up. Why has it—you mentioned a lot of these studies were in the 70s or 80s—and we've even talked about a hundred years ago in Winnetka, Illinois they were doing some essentially mastery learning—why isn’t—in your sense—kind of the mainstream way of learning today?

Well, our systems aren't set up to do this. So if you think about a classroom—even with 30 kids, much less a school with hundreds of kids—how do you have everyone go at their own pace? Like, it's not scalable; it's not how we can then educate a whole bunch of learners.

So, that's the beauty of a supplement like Khan Academy is we can think about how to create a hybrid approach where students are keeping up at grade level—and that's important—we know for students to be able to make progress and get to eventually where they need to be. But at the same time, they can be filling their gaps in between, so that they are not having those big holes in the Swiss cheese that they don't know how to—

that inhibit them from learning the new content. So I think in order to be able to work in the system we have with schools and learners, we need to think about how that hybrid approach comes together.

Yeah, that makes sense! You know, there's a question here from Facebook. Mona Lisa Carr, and this is I think a question a lot of people are asking right now: "How can the engagement of students be done now that the online classes are here to stay and are the new norm? How can we make their learning more effective?"

So yeah, I mean this is a big question right now.

It sure is! I think first I would say do not just try to replicate everything we did in the in-school classroom in a digital environment. Instead, think about, "All right, what are our main goals? How can we use the digital environment in maybe new ways to help us get there?"

If you think about the things the digital world lets us do, it lets us potentially set up problems and scenarios that are more in-depth and we can think about, for instance, simulations that allow us to simulate things that maybe we can't even see in the real world or let us try things that would be really dangerous in the real world.

Thinking about how we can take advantage of what the digital world lets us do to do kind of some fun and interesting things that keep students engaged and motivated, I think is the approach we need to take instead of saying, “How can we just move what we've done before and put it in the new place?”

Yeah, no, that makes sense. And I'll just add, you know, I think even in in-person classrooms, the more interactive it is, the better. And you know, people heard me go off about, you know, 300 lecture halls just lecturing—don't really make a lot of sense.

But that's that much more important—in a digital environment—because obviously, if someone just lectures to someone for 60 minutes in a digital environment, that might as well be a video! And frankly, that should have been chunked up into, you know, five, six-minute-long videos.

So when you're on the Zoom or Google Meet, the more interactive it can be where you're able to pull students out, and maybe there is—to your point—you could maybe do shorter sessions, but do it with smaller groups of students. Let them—you know, Khan Academy is valuable for the asynchronous part where kids can learn at their own time and pace, do the mastery learning, teachers can monitor. And that way when they go synchronous on Zoom or whatever else or in the classroom ideally, they can go deeper.

And some kids can continue to work at their own time and pace while some kids get a much more highly focused intervention at a ratio that is normally hard to do. To your points, normally you're getting a 30-to-1, one pace fits all, and some kids are lost, some kids are bored, and no one really feels that personal attention!

But obviously, in a class of 30, 15 could work on something else while 15 get a deeper dive on something they need.

Yeah, and what you've talked about—that difference between active and passive—is another one of those big, fundamental things in learning science.

There's actually something that's called the ICAP framework—ICAP. As you go through it, you can think about the impact on learning. So, the P is passive—that's like just sitting there watching a video and doing nothing, so that's going to have the least amount of impact on learning.

And then from there, you can think about active—so I'm actually, you know, answering questions and doing something. Then the C stands for constructing, and that just means I'm actually creating something. And so if I'm having to do all of the creation and thinking about where that is, that's going to be even more impactful on learning.

And finally, the I is interactive, and that's interacting with other people about the content, and that's the most powerful thing you can do! So if we think about the availability of video conferencing—many of them have the capability of doing small groups—so how can instead of thinking the video conferencing is a way for me to redo my lecture to all of you, how can I break you into small groups and have you talk about the content instead of thinking about it as a one-way transmission of what we're doing?

So as you think about what we know about learning and how can we then help use the digital tools to help us take advantage of those pieces, I think that's going to give the strongest results in this new world we're in!

Yeah, or any world we're in frankly! But it's that much more important—that much more important!

To your point, these conversations always go faster, but luckily, Kristin, we're part of the same team, so we'll have you on many times.

Maybe just finish—what are your—people have heard me talk about my hopes and dreams for Khan Academy, you know, even at a high level as an institution, but also sometimes as an experience—what are your hopes for Khan Academy, at least from a learning science point of view, but really on any dimension?

Yeah! No, I think definitely most of them are related to the learning science point of view, although the overall vision of a world-class free education for anyone anywhere is pretty amazing. But I think the piece that then I can contribute to that is thinking about how do we make the most of this idea of being a key supplemental resource.

How can we best take advantage of mastery learning and help teachers do that in the classroom in ways that flow easily for them and become just then another part of how they teach?

And then as that pieces, we think about how we can be integrated into classrooms and help support teachers in being able to scale that idea of mastery learning, then the next piece becomes how can we also think about these ideas of being more active and encouraging activity?

How do we provide resources to help teachers do that, both with Khan Academy? And if Khan Academy is helping the teachers do more of the practice and the feedback, how can teachers then have more time to do more of the potentially constructive and interactive things that they might be able to do?

So, I see us becoming just a trusted supplement that helps teachers overall teach in the ways that they want to teach and help learners be able to get those better learning outcomes that they’re going to get to.

Yeah, no, we’re excited! I'm excited to do it with you, hopefully, and then the whole team here at Khan Academy.

Thanks so much for joining, Kristin!

Thank you, Sal! It's a pleasure to be here.

So thanks everyone for joining today! I do—you know, there are so many dimensions to talk about these days. We actually are going to have tomorrow two live streams.

One, we're going to have at 8:30 in the morning Pacific time, which is 11:30 Eastern time, with Bill Lewis, who's the co-chair of Lazard, the investment bank. And you know, he’ll talk about his life journey and also just talk about, you know, the really important question of race in America, and all of this energy that is out there right now.

How does it get channeled so that we, you know, as a society, we move forward? So that's going to be a really fascinating conversation. And then tomorrow at our regular time, we're going to have Governor Jeb Bush to talk—you know, when we scheduled Governor Bush, it was really to talk about things like COVID and the economy, and we’re going to—and education.

Governor Bush is very active in the education space, as is Bill Lewis. And then we’re going to, you know, obviously also talk about some of the same themes about what's going on in the country right now.

So, you have a double feature of our live stream tomorrow—some really important questions. And once again, what makes this interesting is you have a chance to ask these very knowledgeable and interesting folks questions.

So please join us tomorrow, and I'll see you then!