Course Mastery Sal (intro only)

Hi teachers, this is Sal Khan here from Khan Academy, and welcome to Course Mastery.

So, back in 1984, famous education researcher Benjamin Bloom published the famous Two Sigma study, where he showed that a student who works in a mastery learning framework with a tutor one-on-one can operate two standard deviations better. The student who is operating at the 50th percentile can operate well into the 90th percentile, 95th, 96th percentile. You fast forward today, there have been over 200 studies that have backed up his claims.

On top of that, you as an educator know that your students enter your class at all different levels. You also know that differentiation has always been considered a best practice in education. The hard part, however, is how do you do that with 25, 30, 35 kids in the classroom?

All of us at Khan Academy, we firmly believe that if we had to pick between an amazing teacher and an amazing technology, we'd pick you every time—the amazing teacher. Luckily, we don't have to make that trade-off. And so, we're thinking about how can we empower you, an amazing teacher, with as powerful technology as possible.

And that's what Course Mastery is. It's a way for you to set mastery goals for your students, and these goals are fairly large goals, so they'd be appropriate for over a term or over a school year. You said it once, and then you can feel confident that over the rest of the year or the rest of the term, your students have things to work on that are appropriate for them.

They'll be able to learn at their own time and pace, master concepts at their own time and pace, consistent with Benjamin Bloom's work, and remediate their gaps as necessary. Multiple studies have shown that when students on Khan Academy are able to engage in mastery learning, learn at their own time and pace for even 30 minutes or more per week—so say 45 minutes a week or one class period a week—they're able to accelerate their learning, as measured by standardized benchmark exams, by 20 or 30 percent.