Austin Scholar #13: The Pros and Cons of Khan Academy
Hey, y'all!
Welcome to the Austin Scholar newsletter! To all of my new subscribers, I'm so excited and grateful that y'all are here! To all of my returning subscribers, welcome back, and thank you for the continued support.
Please forward this newsletter to other parents who want to learn ways to help make twelve years of school less painful and more fulfilling for their children.
This week from Austin Scholar…
The Pros and Cons of Khan Academy
Three sources on Khan’s effectiveness with high school students
The previous newsletter went into depth about AP stress and how to manage the challenges that May brings to high school students, and let me tell you, I wasn’t exaggerating. This week I’ve been consumed with studying and practice tests for next week’s exams.
I’ve been pretty stressed and don’t have time to write a proper newsletter, so for this week’s issue I brought out an article from the vault: The Pros and Cons of Khan Academy. This article has a similar model to Austin Scholar #5: Knowing Knewton and the “Working the Program” section goes through examples of me actually going through Khan, which is substituting the anecdote for this week.
Please remember to support your high schoolers this month!
The Pros and Cons of Khan Academy
Everyone knows about Khan Academy. Sal Khan made a name for himself as the leading innovator in online learning and mastery-based learning.
Surprisingly, though, in my experience, Khan Academy is actually not one of my favorite apps. While apps such as Outlier were built completely focused on online learning, Khan Academy focused on making sure that the app was able to align with a teacher’s lessons. For students who are learning without teachers, this caused the quality of Khan Academy to decrease and made other apps much better choices for online learning.
Overview
Though Khan Academy provides many courses and subjects, I will focus on Khan Math, as I have spent the most time in the math courses.
Comprehensiveness: 5/10
Comprehensiveness measures the app's ability to cover all of the necessary content in a course. In my experience, Khan Academy teaches overall concepts and ideas, not individual problems and applications. Even if I completed a Khan math course to 100%, I would not be able to score above a 90% on a state-issued Credit by Examination (CBE) test for the same course. The holes in the content cause the comprehensiveness score to decrease.
Adaptiveness: 4/10
Adaptability measures how well the app adjusts the content shown to a student based on what that student knows. While Khan includes many methods of testing the students and ensuring they know the content, it is extraordinarily easy to game the system. (See: #1 Weakness)
Place in Sequence: 2nd App
In A High Schooler's Guide to Reaching the 99th Percentile, I explained the importance of sequencing apps, or completing multiple apps for each course. As Khan Academy scores higher on adaptiveness and lower on comprehensiveness, it is best suited to be a second app.
#1 Weakness:
From an objective standpoint, Khan Academy's worst feature is how easy it is to "memorize your way to mastery." While this can lead to students completing Khan Academy courses at an incredibly fast rate, the students are less inclined to learn the content. The way Khan is set up allows a student to memorize the answers to each problem by clicking through the questions, and, after a couple of minutes, input the memorized answers as the same questions cycle through. Additionally, some of the question formattings can lead students to memorize what the answers are instead of how to find the answers. (See: Working the Program)