Colleagues,
Below is a tantalizing introduction by high school math teacher and Stanford University graduate student Dan Meyer to his blog article report on his close examination of what students are asked to do in the 8th grade Khan Academy math curriculum:
"Khan Academy claims alignment with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) but an analysis of their eighth-grade year indicates that alignment is loose. 40% of Khan Academy exercises assessed the acts of calculating and solving whereas the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium’s assessment of the CCSS emphasized those acts in only 25% of their released items. 74% of Khan Academy’s exercises resulted in the production of either a number or a multiple-choice response, whereas those outputs accounted for only 25% of the SBAC assessment."
For the full blog article, see http://blog.mrmeyer.com/2014/what-students-do-and-dont-do-in-khan-academy/?utm_source=EdsurgeTeachers&utm_campaign=f22891db1c-Instruct+148&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3d103d3ffb-f22891db1c-292312377
David J. Rosen
djrosen123@gmail.com
Comments
Sal Khan has stated that the way to understand math is to do a lot of problems, so it's no surprise that his content would focus on procedures ;)
I had several students in the lab today prepping for our placement test and talking about resources. One of them noted that yes, the materials had mistakes but that generally somebody in the comments would say "when he said ____, he meant to say ____" (and that yes, his voice was ... monotonous... and he repeated himself a lot...).
I suspect that the alignment is about the same for most of this kind of resource, though; seems if you find somebody with the budget to put in the exercises and the bells and whistles and badges and leaves, that somehow that trumps pedagogy. I wish the resources at Khan Academy could be sent over to www.mathisfun.com or www.mathantics.com where there's a lot more with concepts and *why* things work.