While Khan Academy’s original focus was on helping individuals learn on their own, in recent years we’ve also worked closely with teachers to understand how we can support their instruction. Over the past two school years, we collaborated with a number of schools and with SRI International to study various types of classroom use and the effects of different implementation approaches on teaching and learning.
We’re excited to see the results of SRI International’s study for the school years 2011-2013, which was published today. While we recognize that we are still in the very early days of this journey, we’re really encouraged by some of the key findings:
- – Positive association between Khan Academy use and some important outcomes:
– Improvements in student test scores
– Improvements in several non-cognitive measures such as students’ math anxiety and belief in their ability to succeed academically
– Teachers reported that integrating Khan Academy into their instruction increased their ability to support their students in a number of areas - – Students’ perceptions of Khan Academy were very positive, and their engagement during Khan Academy sessions was high
- – Students felt that using Khan Academy encouraged greater independence in learning
This also reinforces a lot of what we hear from our users.
Another big goal of our work with SRI and the schools in the study was to understand how we could improve the learning experience for our users. Our close collaboration with schools has been a major driver for many substantial and important changes to Khan Academy, including the personalized dashboard, grade-level missions and tutorials, more comprehensive Math content, and coach reporting.
We’re grateful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with SRI and our partner schools on this project as we innovate and improve to help our millions of learners all over the world!
SRI’s reports can be found on their website at the link below:
http://www.sri.com/work/projects/research-use-khan-academy-schools
