

These need to be designed and facilitated by live human beings who build relationships with students. A rich, robust, empowering education gives students regular opportunities to talk with each other, actively problem-solve with real-world tasks, collaborate on multifaceted projects, impact their communities, and wrestle with life’s big questions. It’s important to note here that no digital learning program can replace many of the experiences students should be having in our classrooms. Here’s an overview of how the system works: With the new Mastery System, Khan is making it happen, and they’re making it free and accessible to anyone who wants it.

Sounds about right: Most teachers would agree that differentiating instruction for students has always been the ideal, but few have ever figured out how to make it happen on a large scale. No one really intellectually disagrees with it.” Benjamin Bloom famously coined this in the ‘80s in his famous 2 Sigma study where he showed that if students are able to learn at their own time and pace in a mastery learning framework-which he defined as a framework where if the student’s at 70 percent or 80 percent correct, they should have as many chances as necessary to get to 90 percent-plus correct-that the same student at the 50th percentile could now be two standard deviations higher than that. “Arguably it’s the oldest way of learning,” he said, “that you should learn at a pace that’s comfortable for you and then master concepts as you go on.
