Discover how teachers are using course mastery

(upbeat music) - When I first arrived at my school district, I learned that we had not yet set a specific curriculum to use in our math classrooms. As a result, I spoke with many of my colleagues and found Khan academy to be one of those resources that they often used in their classroom to help differentiate instruction. I decided to explore it on my own from a learner's perspective to see how students could use the videos, articles, and assignments to help better learn the academic standards. (upbeat music) - So at the beginning of the year, I assigned the fourth grade course mastery and that really sets the table for everything. In order to help me figure out where the kids are with their learning process, I use a lot of different tools. One that's really easy to use at the beginning of the year is just the course challenge. The kids are gonna come to me in fourth grade. They're gonna say, hmm, what do I already know? And chances are, they're gonna start fourth grade. Chances are, it's not gonna be a whole lot, but they can take that course challenge and say, "Oh, I do know this thing. I know a little bit about this content area and these other things, I have no idea." And with our classroom community, one thing I really work on trying to build the scene These are things that you're going to work on. These are the things that are coming up next. So if you don't know what, don't worry. That's why you're in fourth grade. (upbeat music) - Another newer addition to Khan academy that I find really useful is the course mastery feature. One part of this feature is the mastery challenges. These challenges refresh every 12 hours or so and provide a quick snapshot of problems based upon student's previous assignments. I love to use these in my classroom as a little mini quiz. This is not something I count for a grade, but I use it to help spiral review. A lot of times it can be difficult for students to remember things throughout the year, but by using these short little quizzes, students are able to practice these skills that they've learned throughout the year in a way that's not necessarily intimidating, but it's short and sweet and encourages them to do well. (upbeat music) - I use course mastery to get ready for the AP exam. I decided to use chorus mastery couple of years ago when I realized that students can benefit from this at their own time. So I decided to assign course mastery quarterly basis instead of one big course mastery annual goal. So I decided to use it as a quarterly goal but I assigned the whole course master at the beginning of the year, and I expected to complete about 20% per quarter. And I would give them a goal of about 80% per year before their AP exam. And I realized that their scores, their AP scores significantly increased for those students who completed their course mastery. So I think it was beneficial to my students. (upbeat music) - In my classroom., I really like to use data binders, and in these data binders, it seems like I have a chart for everything. So a couple of the charts that I use in Khan academy deal with the grade levels and then the fourth grade level. You see the difference between like the old school grades, if you got a bad grade and you got a zero percent, it's gonna destroy your grade. But with the bar graph, it's really showing that this is learning and progress. So maybe I took the course challenge or maybe I took the unit test and did it horrible, but it was a pre-test. And I started at 8% and then we did some lessons and we did some learning, then the student was getting better with it. Now it was an 8%. Now we're at 20%, and now we take a quiz, and now we do some more learning and then that continues to go higher and higher. But we also have a bulletin board that keeps track of our progress as well. So throughout the class, we can start to see, "Oh, we're at 94% class average." And then a couple of kids who were like, "Oh, I can finish, I can finish." And so they'll work really hard to try to get that done. And it's like, this community is trying to come together and we're trying to strive for 100%.