Salman Khan has developed outstanding
lessons that communicate content concepts very well. I have watched a number of
his tutoring videos as well as his TED talk and both have added to my respect
for what he is doing. I join many others in believing that the Khan Academy is
making an important contribution to contemporary education.
Such statements always seem to call for a
"but" or a "however" and I offer mine here based on my own
experience.
The problem I see about Khan Academy is that, in
addition to serving a useful tutoring role, it purports to offer a complete
educational experience: that is, for example, it claims to teach a high school
algebra course. And a number of schools are now using the Khan materials to teach
such courses with classroom teachers playing, at best, supportive roles. We
also have an evaluation of the program being undertaken by the SRI Foundation
with the support, as it has of the academy itself, of the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation.
Whatever the outcome of that early research study,
I predict that school adoptions of Khan Academy materials will ultimately fail
and be withdrawn. My prediction is based largely on the infamous Raleigh
Experiment of the early 1960s. I believe that considering the history of that
too long forgotten experiment has lessons for us today and I offer it here.
The Raleigh experiment involved the use of another
purported educational panacea, programmed instruction. Programmed instruction
was the ultimate behavioral approach to teaching. A school subject was broken
down into tiny elements and those elements were taught in a question-answer (paper-and-pencil
at that time) dialog with immediate feedback. Although each question gained
only a minute amount of ground, over time the gains mounted up and concepts
were inculcated. And, as with the Khan Academy program, students learned.
To implement this process mathematician Jack Forbes
of the University of Illinois Chicago Circle, prepared a programmed text that
covered the content of a first year algebra course for Encyclopedia Britannica
Press (EBP) through which students would independently work their way.
The publisher talked the Raleigh, North Carolina
school system into undertaking a carefully designed year-long study of Forbes'
product. Three groups were identified: (1) a control group of classes taught
using standard resources by their regular classroom instructors, (2) a group of
classes that used the Forbes materials with a teacher serving as a back-up
mentor for students, and (3) a group of classes that used the Forbes materials
with only a clerk in the classroom to pass out and receive materials and to
administer tests.
At the end of the year the students were tested and
the results were explosive. Programmed instruction was the big winner. There
were significant differences in the test scores with group (3) best, (2) second
and (1) last. You can just imagine how teachers, and Raleigh teachers in
particular, were embarrassed by these results.
Of course, this made national headlines, schools
fought to sign up for EBP programs, and publishers everywhere established their
own author teams to write similar materials. (I headed up one of those teams
for Prentice Hall.)
But then reality set in. The results could not be
duplicated. The experiment was a perfect realization of the Hawthorne Effect.
Students in groups (2) and (3) had been identified as participants in an
important experiment and that year of study was their championship season. They
put up with the day after day of drudgery and they temporarily took
responsibility for mid-numbing hours of addressing atom-sized bits of
self-instruction.
Without the special attention and contest-like
atmosphere, the program failed with all but a few highly motivated students and
the result was predictable. Publishers withdrew their interest - our contract
was among those canceled - and EBP was left with a failed program. There were,
of course, no corresponding national headlines about this turn-around.
I predict that the same fate will befall those who
substitute full time use of the Khan materials for more traditional classroom
instruction. Universal panaceas like this that place all the load on students'
shoulders simply do not work over the long haul.
There is a more important aspect of the history I
have described, however. Despite this failure, the EBP materials were of
excellent quality and served very well when used in appropriate settings. For
example, at the time the project took place I was math coordinator for the
Norwalk, Connecticut schools where we had absence problems. Students missed
school when they were hospitalized or took extended vacations with their
families. When we identified these situations, we offered students and parents
sections of those EBP programmed materials that covered the content they were
missing. And this worked very well in many of these short-term settings. Thus
the materials had a useful contribution to make.
Sadly, that possibility, or in fact any other use
of those books, is no longer an option. Those materials are gone. Try eBay or
Amazon and you will not find them. In fact, you will be hard put to find any
programmed instruction materials anywhere. I expect that course sets today
would be worth hundreds of dollars simply for their historical value.
That is what bothers me about the excellent Khan
materials. While I predict that schools that go whole hog with this approach
will soon meet the barrier that the Raleigh schools did, that doesn't mean that
the materials have no value. They will continue to provide another instructional
tool to be used in individual classroom settings and by individual students and
parents.
I just hope that they will not suffer the fate of
the EBP books, but I worry that the industrial model for our schools imposed by
foundations like that of Bill and Melinda Gates will mean withdrawal of support
when test results don't confirm their prior expectations.
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