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Mastery Goals

Course mastery is part of Khan for Educators, a free course for teachers to learn more about Khan Academy, the content and tools available for teachers and students, and best practices for implementing technology with students. Created by Meaghan Pattani.

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Video transcript

(upbeat music) - In this video, we're going to explore Khan Academy's mastery goal system. At Khan Academy, we're committed to the concept of mastery learning, which is embodied in our mastery goal system. But what does mastery goal mean? Essentially, it is a tool that allows teachers to establish and monitor goals for their students, while also promoting self-paced learning. When we talk about master goals, we're referring to a student's ability to understand a subject thoroughly and do so at their own speed. Think of mastery goals as your student's personal learning map in subjects like math or even our new digital SAT reading and math courses. Course mastery covers a year worth of discoveries and learning. It's your student's long-term goal. Unit mastery, on the other hand, is like a treasure hunt within the big adventure. It's all about finding and mastering skills for just one unit at a time. It's your student's short-term goal. Let's walk through how to assign mastery goals to your students. When you log into Khan Academy, you'll land on the teacher dashboard. Click on the name of the class you want to create a mastery goal for. On the left-hand side navigation, go to the Mastery Goals tab and click Assign. If you haven't done so already, add the on grade level course you currently teach. Click the blue hyperlink, Edit Courses. Next, you'll be on the Course Mastery Placement page. Click Create Course Goal. You can confirm your assigned and desired goals to students by selecting Mastery Goals on the left-hand panel and then selecting Progress. You will now see the current mastery goals assigned to students in your class and their progress towards meeting that goal. Now, let's look a little closer at what students see in terms of mastery goals. When students log into Khan Academy, they will be on their learner homepage. Each student will be able to see their teacher or class name on the left-hand side. By clicking on the class, students will see their mastery goals at the top of their page. A student can click the goal at any time and continue from where they left off to make progress towards their goal. Students can also continue working towards their mastery goal on the iOS and Android apps as well. There are several ways for students to practice. They can practice a single concept at a time on an exercise or they could practice mixed skills on a quiz, unit test, course challenge, or mastery challenge. As students get questions right, they move up from not started to familiar to proficient. The top level is mastered. Students can only get to mastered by getting to proficient and then getting that concept right again in a mixed-skill setting. Mastery challenges can be used for spiral review and they're just six questions each. It will appear for each student when they have reached familiar level on at least three skills and have reached proficiency on at least one skill. The mastery challenge refreshes every 12 hours. We do like to think of this as a spiral review. Most teachers recommend having students start with a course challenge or a specific unit test within the course. Students may navigate to the course challenge in their account or teachers may assign the course challenge. This way, both students and teachers can quickly identify gaps and strengths in students' knowledge in order to provide the right content and the right support at the right moment. Course challenges contain 30 questions and can be used as a pre-assessment, as well as a progress monitoring tool. A mastery goal is considered achieved once a student reaches 80% of their course mastery goal. We'll be diving deeper into reports in a later session but let's take a look at where to find mastery progress for students. Starting at the teacher dashboard, select a class. Select Mastery Goals from the left navigation menu, then select Progress. This report shows student progress on the assigned course. Khan Academy also has a skills report found under the Activity tab to dive deeper into the individual skill for a given course. On the skills report, you can open any unit to get a quick view of how students are progressing. By clicking on a specific skill, you'll be able to see the mastery level for every student for that skill. If you notice that several students are struggling on a skill, you can assign extra practice on that skill right here in the skills report. We'll talk more about how to make assignments in a separate video. We hope this video helps you start using mastery goals with your students. (upbeat music)