Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos

What Hacker News said

Strong rec joshg · 2011-06 · on “The Dangerous Mr. Khan”

Well if you want to pay great teachers to produce science videos, I would start by offering this guy a lot of money. Or at the very least, please watch the whole video because it explains one massive problem with video science lessons and how to partially fix the problem. [this video]

Strong rec james-revisoai · 2023-02 · on “Anki and GPT-3”

Founder of StudyWand.com here, who received a 15k grant to develop an AI generating flashcard app in 2020 after an earlier prototype. We've found students more consistently study ready-made cards that are at desirable difficulty (they get about 80% correct) and which are segmented by topic (e.g. semantic grouping of flashcards to tackle "one lesson at a time" like Duolingo). Students would prefer to use pre-made flashcards by other students in their class, then AI flashcards, then create and use their own. There is limited evidence by Roediger and Karpicke who are the forefathers of retrieval practise that creating cards is also important. Frank Leeming (2002 study Exam-a-day) also showed th

Cites edtechdev · 2014-05 · on “A Test for School Reform in Newark”

Wow, a lot of experts on education here. There are a lot of myths out there about (U.S. K12) education, such as all these "bad teachers" that we can't ever fire because of tenure, and how awful U.S. education is compared to other countries or compared to the U.S. in the 50s and 60s, and how charter schools or vouchers will solve all education's problems. There is actual data and research out there on all this, buried under all this opinion. Did you know for example that tenured teachers are twice as likely to lose their job as non-tenured teachers? [LINK] There is also a history behind all this. Before teacher tenure, teachers were regularly fired on the whim of principals or because of gett

Cites edtechdev · 2022-01 · on “Cognitive load theory and its applications for learning”

Cognitive load theory is unfalsifiable and wrong about many things [LINK] Of course we have limits to how much we can do at once, but learning isn't like filling a bucket. Learning takes active work, effort. An analogy would be like saying 'weight lifting is easier with tiny weights' or 'don't lift too much weight.' Yes, but that's obvious, useless, and forgets the presumed goal of weight lifting, which requires putting in some effort. Similarly, you wouldn't force kids to listen to lectures about baseball or other sports and memorizing all the rules before letting them play. Some of the other things mentioned on the poster article are false or only apply to rote, trivial learning. Remember

Cites Strilanc · 2023-01 · on “Can the double-slit experiment distinguish between quantum interpretations?”

"Plays into common misconceptions" is one of the worst properties that a video targeted at general audiences can have. This even happens if your video is technically correct but sounds sorta like the common misconception [1]. Someone who watched the Dr. Quantum video has learned a bunch of keywords and phrases associated with quantum mechanics. They've now heard of waves and particles and detectors and whatnot. But they have been actively misled with respect to how those things behave. I bet it's possible to put together a reasonable looking test where watching the Dr Quantum video caused scores to go down. 1: [this video]

Cites james-revisoai · 2024-02 · on “How to Study (2023)”

This makes some great points, and Martin Lombell has covered something very similar in a rather timeless one hour engaging lecture here: [LINK] Some other diamonds I've uncovered or found while working on learning psychology are: - that students who organise fun and exercise on their schedule before studying, get better grades than the students who start by deciding when to study; - that most of us can learn much better with confusing, misconception-revealing content, over simple content - we all assume too much, as Veritasium covered: [this video] - in principle, a desirable difficulty of varied content given in a medium that isn't lazy (read: you need to be able to get feedback, like a quiz, or

Cites james-revisoai · 2024-08 · on “Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)”

Some of the teachers I have worked with do this; and there are some great teachers(lecturers) like Martin who teach effective studying techniques: [LINK] Flashcards and Anki were incredibly effective for me. I am building a study tool which automatically generates them from lecture slides. Beyond that, it applies other psychology of learning techniques - It breaks up content into manageable chunks you can see your progress on (to boost your confidence of exam coverage) and has an exam-conditions like mode where it shows you relevant slides, then asks you questions and to freely recall by blurting onto a blank page everything you remember. It's then able to give you a realistic judgement of y

Critical chem21st · 2011-06 · on “The Dangerous Mr. Khan”

Sal, The only thing novel about Khan Academy is accessibility. Its the same old teacher-centered lectures we've endured for the past hundred years, with a somewhat more charismatic instructor. Most of the criticism I've seen of your work isn't "pseudo-intellectual babble," its merely pointing out what I've stated above, and that it isn't in line with what research tells us about how students learn. Your challenge for your critics to produce their own videos misses the point entirely. I happen to think your videos are fine overall, and while I find some specific science content oversimplified and focus too much on mechanics rather than conceptual understanding, it serves very well for student