Self paced learning proves a hit at Los Altos school

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9. "You Khan’t Ignore How Students Learn"

http://fnoschese.wordpress.com/tag/khan-academy/

This physics teacher has several blog entries of his criticisms of Khan video system:

"A video lecture is not interactive engagement.

“…maybe you explain once and you reemphasize that this goes against misconception A, B, C, or D.”

Khan (along with most of the general public, in my opinion) has this naive notion that teaching is really just explaining. And that the way to be a better teacher is to improve your explanations. Not so! Teaching is really about creating experiences that allow students to construct meaning.

“And I think frankly, the best way to do it is you put stuff out there and you see how people react to it…”

This is flawed. People’s reactions are not indicators of effectiveness. Pre/post testing is needed to indicate effectiveness. Ah, but perhaps there is a relationship between people’s reaction and effectiveness? The research indicates otherwise. In the very research study that Khan says is valid (and then dismisses), student actually did better after watching the videos they described as confusing, and made no gains after watching the videos they described as easy to understand. Additional research indicates that when an instructor switches over to IE methods, course evaluations from students tend to be more negative than the previous year, despite gains from students going up. (Don’t worry, a few years after the switch to IE, the evaluations go back to pre-IE levels.)

“You see, the comments they put, they’ll ask questions based on… Every time I put a YouTube video up, I look at the comments — at least the first 20, 30, 40 comments that go up — and I can normally see a theme: that look, a lot of people kind of got the wrong idea here. Or maybe some people did, and then I’ll usually make another video saying “Hey, look after the last video, I read some the comments and a lot of y’all are saying this is not what we’re talking about it’s completely different.” So that means I am attacking the misconceptions.”

Again, it’s not about crafting better explanations. It’s about helping students wrestle with their conceptions and guiding them."