By Aviv Weiss, Khan Academy Districts
Each quarter, we sit down with Dr. Kristen DiCerbo, Khan Academy’s Chief Learning Officer, to reflect on what she’s seeing in the field, in the research, and in the data. In this conversation, Kristen shares learnings about motivating learners in a group and an update on Khan Academy’s work in developing assessments.
Aviv Weiss: We recently released two motivation features as part of the reimagined Khan Academy experience. Can you tell us about how these came to be and what we know about team versus individual competition in the classroom?
Kristen DiCerbo: We recently released a team game and classroom leaderboards in our reimagined experience. The team game gets groups of students in a classroom to see who can get the most skills to proficient in a given time period (for example, ten minutes). The leaderboard tracks which classes in a school have the most skills to proficient. Building these schools led to conversations amongst us about competition and had me going back to the research literature to see what it says about the impacts of competition on learning.
It is always a good idea to define terms. This discussion involves:
- Individual learning – Students work on their own to achieve goals
- Cooperation/ Cooperative learning – a model in which students support each other’s learning working together toward a goal
- Individual competition – individuals compete against each other for a limited number of available rewards/ recognition
- Team competition/ Coopetition – Individuals collaborate in teams but compete against other teams for a limited number of available rewards/ recognition
When I look at research I want to find reviews of research that look across many studies rather than cherry picking just one study. There is one of these reviews of research that looks across 122 studies. It shows that team competition and cooperation both have better outcomes than individual learning or individual competition, and that they do not have significantly different outcomes from each other. So either cooperative learning or team competition have similar positive effects.
“…team competition and cooperation both have better outcomes than individual learning or individual competition”
Dr. Kristen DiCerbo
In this case, we leaned into two features to promote team competition that we often see happening in schools outside of the platform. I was in a school last fall where the front bulletin board contained pictures of the classes with the most skills to proficient gained on Khan Academy. We hope the addition of tools in the system help add to this healthy motivation to keep learning.
Aviv: What can you share about our innovations in the Assessments work at this time? What’s truly “next generation” about our work?
Kristen: Over the past year, we have been piloting a feature called Explain Your Thinking with select pilot schools. This feature is meant to mimic the conversations that teachers have with students about their work. They might sit with a student and say things like, “Tell me why you did that step next,” or “What does that answer tell you about the problem?” Our Explain Your Thinking similarly asks students to first answer a traditional question and then engage in a conversation with the AI about their answer. We use prompting behind the scenes to guide the AI to ask questions that get at particular conceptual ideas. Our piloting has shown that in this conversation, students reveal understandings that are not apparent from their response to the traditional question, which is just scored as right or wrong.
“Our piloting has shown that in this conversation, students reveal understandings that are not apparent from their response to the traditional question, which is just scored as right or wrong”
We are excited to be able to provide both students and teachers with more information about student thinking with this new feature.
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