- Hi teachers, this is Sal Khan here from Khan Academy
and welcome to Course Mastery.
So back in 1984, famous education researcher
Benjamin Bloom published the famous two-sigma study
where he showed that a student who works
in a mastery learning framework with a tutor,
one-on-one can operate two standard deviations better.
So the student who is operating in the 50th percentile
can operate well into the 90th percentile,
95th, 96th percentile.
You fast forward to today, there have been
over 200 studies that have backed up his claims.
On top of that, you as an educator,
know that your students enter your class
at all different levels.
You also know that differentiation has always been
considered a best practice in education.
The hard part, however, is how do you do that
with 25, 30, 35 kids in the classroom?
All of us at Khan Academy, we firmly believe
that if we have to pick between an amazing teacher
and an amazing technology, we'd pick you every time,
the amazing teacher.
Luckily, we don't have to make that trade-off,
and so we're think about how can we empower you,
an amazing teacher, with as powerful technology as possible?
And that's what Course Mastery is.
It's a way for you to set mastery goals
for your students, and these goals are fairly large goals,
so that they'd be appropriate for over a term
or over a school year, and you set it once
and then you can feel confident that over the rest
of the year or the rest of the term,
your students have things to work on
the are appropriate for them.
They'll be able to learn at their own time and pace,
master concepts at their own time and pace,
consistent with Benjamin Bloom's work,
and remediate their gaps as necessary.
And multiple studies have shown that when students
on Khan Academy are able to engage in mastery learning,
learn at their own time and pace,
for even 30 minutes or more per week.
So say 45 minutes a week, or one class period a week,
they're able to accelerate their learning
as measured by standardized benchmark exams
by 20 or 30%.