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Course mastery

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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  • blobby green style avatar for user N.Demanuele
    When I first started integrating Khan Academy in my classroom, new students would be given a quick assessment with Math for example to determine where each student needs to start. Is this still used with students has this been discontinued?
    (10 votes)
    • stelly blue style avatar for user Evan Lewis
      There's no general math diagnostic, but one method that works well is to have your students work through the Course Challenge for a specific course or the Unit Test for a specific unit. This will then give students credit for skills that they have already mastered, and it will also recommend videos and practice exercises for skills that they are struggling with.
      (3 votes)
  • spunky sam blue style avatar for user Donna Huck
    I've a new student, but don't know how to add the assignments to him. In the past new students prompted a pop-up that asked to add the assignments... this did not happen for this student.
    (1 vote)
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  • leafers seedling style avatar for user bbateman
    So how does a classroom teacher reconcile the concept of course mastery with the silly convention of quarterly standards-based grading systems?
    (1 vote)
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    • stelly blue style avatar for user Evan Lewis
      If your school is using a standards-based grading system, you should be able to use the Skills report to help you submit students' grades. To access this, go to the Activity Overview in your class and then click the Skills tab.

      This will allow you to view each student's mastery progress by skill. Each skill is associated with a standard, so you can use this report to record students' mastery of standards.
      (1 vote)
  • blobby green style avatar for user MelissaC
    I want to assign different courses to different students in the same class...they get to choose which course to work on for enrichment. How can I make this happen?
    (1 vote)
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  • orange juice squid orange style avatar for user paulcaspers
    Is there any way to reset a students' course mastery? I teach English across all levels of high school. I would like to run my previous year's students back through the Grammar course to demonstrate that they retained mastery. Is the best option to simply assign them the unit tests which will back them down a level for missed items?
    (1 vote)
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    • stelly blue style avatar for user Evan Lewis
      Hi Paul,

      There's not a way to completely reset course mastery progress, other than creating a new account. If you would like to go this route, you can create your students' accounts for them via the Students tab in your KA class, which will allow them to use a second account without needing another email address.

      Alternatively, you can assign the Unit Tests from each unit like you mentioned. After completing the test, their mastery progress will move down for skills that they answered incorrectly, and will simply remain the same for skills that they had previously Mastered and now got correct on the unit test.
      (1 vote)
  • blobby green style avatar for user mcahill
    I haven't seen anywhere showing how to add questions. I teach accounting and would need to add assignments to compliment what I have seen during my quick review of the courses. My question being how can I add to what's already pre-caned as they say?
    (0 votes)
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Video transcript

- Hi, I'm Meagan from Khan Academy. And in this video, we're gonna explore Khan Academy's course mastery system. At Khan Academy we're devoted to mastery learning, and build our content around our course mastery system. However, a question we hear frequently from teachers is, what exactly do we mean by course mastery on Khan Academy? Course mastery on Khan Academy, is a feature that allows teachers to set and track long term learning goals for students, while encouraging students to work at their own pace. Currently course mastery is available for courses with full practice content. All of our math courses including AP Calculus, AB, BC, AP Statistics and our Get Ready for grade level courses, as well as Grammar, High School Biology, AP Biology, AP Physics 1, US government and civics, AP US government and politics, US History, AP US history, World History Project Origins, AP macroeconomics, Microeconomics, AP Microeconomics, and AP Computer Science Principles. Assigning course mastery goals, allows teachers to set and track long term goals. Let's walk through how to assign course mastery goals to your students. When you log in to Khan Academy, you'll land on the teacher dashboard. Click on the name of the class, you want to assign a mastery goal. On the left hand side navigation, go to the course mastery placement tab, if you haven't done so already, at the on grade level course you currently teach. And if you're a math teacher, add to get ready for grade level course. If you're about to start the school year, we recommend assigning the get ready for grade level course, as a course mastery goal, to have students begin the year, by gap filling and strengthening fundamentals, before diving into on grade level skills. For example, if I were a 5th grade teacher, I would start the year by signing the get ready for fifth grade course. Click the blue button, add these courses. Now you'll be on the course mastery placement page. Click assign goal, you can confirm your assign the desired goals to students, by selecting course mastery placement on the left-hand panel, and you will now see the current mastery goals, assigned to students in your class. A students work on Khan Academy. You can also add additional courses, for students to work on, either below or above grade level. You can assign the same course for all students to master, or you can assign different courses to individuals or groups of students. We recommend using Khan Academy's skill report, to look more closely at students progress, and determine the best goal, or goals for each student. Now let's look a little closer at what students see in terms of course mastery goals. When students log in to Khan Academy, they will view on their learner home page, 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 goal. A student can click the goal at any time, and continue from where they left off, to make progress towards their goal. Students can continue working toward their mastery goal, on the iOS and Android apps as well. Every skill or concept has multiple mastery levels, and students earn additional points, with each new level. There are several ways for students to practice, they can practice a single concept at a time on an exercise, or they can practice a mix of different concepts, 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, on a unit test, course challenge, or mastery challenge. Most teachers recommend, having students start with the course challenge, or specific unit tests within the course. This way both students and teachers, can quickly identify gaps and strengths in student knowledge, in order to provide the right content, and right support in the right moment. When students are stuck or missed questions, their mastery level moves down, and a symbol appears next to the concept, to help them remember where to focus. If students are consistently missing problems about a concept, they'll move to attempted status, and a red dot will appear next to that concept. Mastery of individual concepts, contributes to unit progress, and to overall course progress. A mastery goal is considered achieved, once a student reaches 90% mastery, though they can still access previous goals, at any time. Students can always see what they've completed, and what they should work on next. Additionally, once students have begun working in a course, they will receive mastery challenges, which appear at the top of the course page. Mastery challenges, highlight opportunities for students to engage in personalized spaced repetition of the skills, students have already started practicing. Research shows that spiraling skills over time, and across lessons, is a key component to minimizing student learning loss, and improving knowledge retention. We'll be diving deeper into reports, in a later lesson. But let's take a quick look, at where to find mastery progress, for students. Starting at the teacher dashboard, select a class, select course mastery progress, from the left-hand panel. This report shows student progress on the selected course. First you'll see class progress, towards overall course mastery, and the median mastery for the class as a whole. Below, you'll see the mastery for each unit, perhaps it's the start of the year, and you're focusing on this first unit. By clicking on any unit, you can see the additional detail of progress, for each student at the unit level, including each student's mastery progress, for that unit, and the class median, for unit mastery progress. Khan Academy also has a skills report, found under the activity overview, to dive deeper into the individual skills for a given course. On the skills report, you can open any unit, to get a quick view of how students are progressing, for the skills in that unit, by looking at the purple bars on the right side. By clicking on a specific skill, you will 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. Some advice from teachers using Khan Academy's course mastery in their classrooms. Mastering an entire course, can feel daunting to students, so break it up into checkpoints, like monthly goals. You can also consider having students focus, on particular units throughout the year. Then check the unit report, to see how they're doing. Also you don't need to assign the same course mastery goal, to every student. To differentiate, you can assign different courses to different students. Some teachers even assign a mastery goal for a previous grade level, as review at the start of the year. We hope this video helps you get started, using course mastery with your students.