Sal Khan's thoughts on mastery learning

2m read

·Nov 11, 2024

This idea of mastery learning was always kind of this gold standard. This was actually as a part of a fellowship I had while I was at MIT called the Eleranta fellowship to make a learning software for students with ADHD. It immediately struck a chord with me because going into that, the whole premise of the software that I was working on was this idea that it's not that students aren't capable of learning some advanced mathematics or that the topics are actually difficult. It's more that they just have gaps in their knowledge.

I did a lot of tutoring in high school and I saw that over and over again; the reason why students were having—my friends were having—trouble with algebra, geometry, it was just because they had a gap in their negative numbers or dividing decimals or logarithms or whatever else. Good students start failing algebra all of a sudden and start failing calculus all of a sudden despite being smart, despite having good teachers. It's usually because they had these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building throughout their foundations.

Now, a lot of skeptics might say, "Well hey, this is all great philosophically; this whole idea of mastery-based learning and its connection to mindset—students taking agency over their learning—makes a lot of sense, but, but, but it seems impractical." The real philosophical core of Khan Academy is mastery learning, and everything we've built—whether it's the video library, the articles we have, the 70,000 items, the game mechanics that we have on our site—it's all in service to mastery learners.

Ellipse standard equation from graph | Precalculus | High School Math | Khan Academy

How to Get and Test Startup Ideas - Michael Seibel

View All

Earthrise: The Story of the Photo that Changed the World | Short Film Showcase

From CBS New York in color, Face the Nation: a spontaneous and unrehearsed news interview with the Apollo 8 astronauts Colonel Frank Borman, the command pilot of the mission, Captain James Lovell, who has logged more hours in space than any other man, and…

First-Ever 3D VR Filmed in Space | One Strange Rock

I spent a hundred and sixty six days off the world, but somewhere along the way my perceptions of the world shifted. [Music] When you’re onboard a spaceship, you’re very much aware of the passage of time. The clock is running, your heart is beating, your…

Multiplying 10s | Math | 4th grade | Khan Academy

Let’s multiply 40 times 70. So, 40 times we have the number 70. So, we could actually list that out, the number 70, 40 different times and add it up, but that’s clearly a lot of computation to do, and there’s got to be a faster way. So, another way is …

4 Revolutionary Riddles

At the Palace of Discovery in Paris, they have this huge turntable where you can sit and perform experiments. Like, in the middle of the turntable you can put some water and then add liquid nitrogen, and this creates a kind of fog. These tiny water drople…

First-order reactions | Kinetics | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy

Let’s say we have a hypothetical reaction where reactant A turns into products, and that the reaction is first order with respect to A. If the reaction is first order with respect to reactant A, for the rate law we can write that the rate of the reaction …

Per capita GDP trends over past 70 years | Macroeconomics | Khan Academy

This is a chart from the New York Times that shows us how per capita GDP has trended on an inflation-adjusted basis since 1947. So you can really think about this as the post-World War II era. World War II, of course, ended in 1945. It’s always good to r…

Sal Khan's thoughts on mastery learning

More Articles