Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos

I want to talk about Khan Academy if you haven't heard of it you should definitely check it out one guy Sal Khan has made thousands of videos over 2200 at the moment on everything from math to history and also quite a few videos about science and there are a lot of things to love about Khan Academy first of all everything is freely available through YouTube and Khan's goal is to improve the education for all students and he is an exceptional teacher an absolutely fantastic speaker he also emphasizes mastery which i think is very important so students in the program can only move on after completing 10 questions in a row correctly and he's also developed some activities and software and he's working with schools to try to humanize the classroom to try to help improve the quality of student teacher time and he's pushing the learning well beyond the video area but I want to put that work aside for a moment and just focus on the millions of viewers who watch his science videos online you see I'm skeptical that they actually promote some meaningful learning and that's not just a comment about Khan's videos but a comment on science videos in general so let me explain that skepticism I wrote my PhD thesis on how to create films to teach science specifically physics in a typical study students access to a website where they took a multiple-choice pretest the questions were something like consider a basketball player shooting from the free-throw line after the ball leaves his hand the force on the ball is a upwards and constant B upwards and decreasing C downwards and constant D downwards and decreasing or E to the path of the ball take a minute to think about which answer you would pick and what you think most other people would pick after the pretest students were randomly assigned to see one of several online videos the videos contained correct answers to many of the pretest questions for example here is a clip now we'll consider a case where gravitational force is the only force acting on an object while a juggling ball is in the air we'll ignore air resistance because it's so small only one force acts on the ball throughout its flight this is the force of gravity which is constant and downwards gravity accelerates the ball in the downwards direction after being thrown up a ball travels slower and slower upwards its velocity goes through zero and then it speeds up in the downward direction the whole time the ball is accelerating downwards then it meets the jugglers hand immediately after watching the roughly 10-minute video the students took exactly the same test I also interviewed some students to see what they thought of the video the most common comments were that it was clear concise and easy to understand the students also increased their confidence in the correctness of their answers compared to the pretest so what about how much they learned on the pretest the average score was 6.0 out of 26 and after the video the average was 6.3 what was going on I dug deep in interviews to find out it turned out students did not even correctly remember what was presented in the video that they had seen a few minutes earlier one recalled in the video it said the ball is slowly decreasing in force so therefore it stops at one point and then comes down what was worse another told me it wasn't that hard to pay attention to because I knew already what she was talking about I hadn't told him about this six out of 26 yet so I was listening but I wasn't really paying at most attention what can be done about this perhaps videos are just too passive a medium to attract attention for ten minutes even when you know you're being interviewed after but I see the problem a different way typically we think of education as informing students about things they are not aware of like the French Revolution for example with science presents a different challenge it is not that students know nothing about it but that they already have plenty of ideas most of which are unfortunately wrong scientifically speaking they don't pay attention because they think they know it and then when asked what they saw they falsely remember their own ideas as what was presented is there a way to overcome this well I thought students might pay more attention and be able to understand if their ideas were presented in the video so one of the other videos involved an actor pretending to be a student with the most common misconceptions which were Illustrated can you tell me what happens when a single wall goes around one well Luke's hand gives the ball of force that drives it upwards against gravity but as it goes up this force gradually dies away until at the very top it perfectly balances gravity and then gravity wins or the ball falls down he then discussed with the other dialogue participant why the misconception didn't work and how the scientific idea differed in interviews with students who watched this video no one used the words clear concise or easy to understand most often they said it was confusing but on the post-test the average score nearly doubled to 11 out of 26 when asked to rate how much mental effort they invested in watching the videos students who saw the dialogue with misconceptions averaged a whole point higher than those who saw the explanation without misconceptions and it seems like it worked that increased mental effort translated into more learning so with the veritasium films I always try to start with the misconceptions how long does it take for the earth to go around the Sun well I died obviously that is this is representing the earth again and this represents what do you think yes how far apart are they what rough leg roughly is the following statement true or false humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs I'll say true we really have to tackle these misconceptions somehow it seems if you just present the correct information five things happen number one students think they know it too they don't pay their utmost attention three they don't recognise that what is presented is different to what they're already thinking and four they don't learn a thing and finally five perhaps most troubling ly they get more confident in the ideas they were thinking before and this is a vicious cycle that we have to find a way to break in order to have effective science education so the Khan videos are amazing and definitely a valuable resource for science educators and perhaps people looking for a bit of review but for those who are just starting to learn science I question whether it's going to be that valuable because it doesn't really question their misconceptions may the other person take one day to get around the Sun thanks for year

Channel: Veritasium

Views: 1,080,545

Rating: 4.9061007 out of 5

Keywords: science education, science literacy, khan academy, effectiveness of khan academy, science films, science videos, misconceptions, teaching science

Id: eVtCO84MDj8

Length: 8min 4sec (484 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 17 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Interesting, and I've no doubt the general idea (that you need to challenge people's misconceptions to get them to re-learn) is true, but in the presented example people were confused about what is velocity, vector and force, and I'm not sure either video really explained the difference.

If people don't know that velocity and force are separate, that an object moves at constant speed unless affected by a force, and that a force is an external influence which changes the velocity of an object, no wonder they have a problem determining which forces are acting on the object.

[u/brokenex]

The problem is that you must first figure out what misconception the student has, and then directly address it. This is an onerous task when it comes to internet videos. You can assume what the major misconceptions are, but there will still be a great deal of variation. Teachers with real students in a classroom have a difficult time addressing the concerns and needs of all of their students.

In the study cited, most of the participants were probably college students with at least some rudimentary understanding of science, as such their misconceptions are a little easier to predict. I would like to see the efficacy of directly confronting misconceptions when your audience is very large and diverse.

I appreciate the critique of Khan Academy, but what could actually be done better?

[u/Jasper1984]

If this is the effect of Khan academy, what do you think the effect of the Discovery channel is! That implication might not be entirely correct but i thought i'd share it anyway.

Btw i did learn some stuff on the periodic table on there. About electrons being 2(2 spins) per 'spot' and that once a shell is filled, the next shell comes up and perhaps one that is bigger. And they like full shells. Also the inner electrons go closer to the nucleus as the positive charge of it increases pretty obvious from my physics, actually, hmm perhaps i knew most of that before Khan. ;) (Am I correct?)

[u/[deleted]]

I would be curious if Khan videos that were broken down with questions would be more effective then. Like in a text book when there are problems in each section of a chapter. Instead of just the big chapter review.
So the idea is: For each concept given in a Khan video have a comment bubble asking a question at the end. As well as two or more link bubbles for the various answers that would lead you to new videos explaining why you were wrong/right.

[u/sheet_pans]

This is a great point, I tutor some smart kids and we always go round and round about how what I'm telling them is NOT what they know! I will have to try this approach.

[u/paulginz]

Is your Thesis online?