Setting goals and monitoring progress with Khan Academy

Collaborating with students to set and monitor both short- and long-term goals is a key piece to successfully implementing Khan Academy with students.

As mentioned earlier, setting Course mastery goals is a recommended first step to using Khan Academy with students. Course mastery goals allow students to have a clear, long-term focus on what they want to achieve throughout the year.

While having a long-term goal is great, we recognize that students will also need to break up this big goal into smaller chunks in order to see meaningful, short-term progress.

Students should be encouraged to be part of the goal-setting process, working with the teacher to set high goals that still feel achievable. Explaining how achieving each smaller goal is a step towards reaching the greater goal of mastering the entire course is key to supporting student goal-setting skills and success.

Below are a few approaches teachers and students have found successful for setting short-term goals in service of overall course mastery.

In this model the teacher collaborates with students to set short-term goals focused on mastery progress for the unit.

Example timeline:

Below is an example goal-setting form that teachers can use with students to set SMART (Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant Time-bound) goals around unit and course mastery.

You may notice this goal-setting sheet also includes space for time/effort and student reflection. It’s important that students take time to recognize not only their progress but the time and effort it took for them to achieve that progress. Giving students time and space to reflect on their learning journey empowers them to take ownership of their own learning and continue their growth.

In this approach the teacher collaborates with students to set short-term goals focused on skill progress, either by identifying key skills or a specific number of skills within the course to work on. Most teachers recommend setting weekly skill goals, usually two to five skills per week, to make sure the goals still feel achievable.

Below is an example goal-setting form that teachers can use with students to set SMART (Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant Time-bound) goals around skill and course mastery. (More goal-setting templates can be found here.)

You may notice this goal-setting sheet also includes space for time/effort and student reflection. It’s important for students to recognize not only their progress but the time and effort it took for them to achieve that progress. Giving students time and space to reflect on their learning journey empowers them to take ownership of their own learning and continue their growth.

From your teacher account, you can use Khan Academy’s Progress report to track course and unit progress and the Skills report to track skill-specific progress for all the students in your class. You can also encourage students to monitor their own progress and effort on Khan Academy.

When students log in to Khan Academy, they land on their Learner home. From this page they can check their Course mastery goal progress by selecting Course mastery on the left side navigation. If the student has multiple classes and each class has a Course mastery goal, the student will have a separate Course mastery tab for each class. There will not be separate tabs for multiple goals within the same class.

By selecting the Course mastery goal, the student is taken to the course page. On the course page the student can see their overall course progress and purple bars for each unit that indicate their progress in each unit.

By selecting an individual unit, the student can view overall unit progress and progress for each skill in the unit.

Note: If students want a better understanding of how to make progress from one mastery level to another, they can select the question mark next to the Skill summary.

This will display a student-friendly guide to skill mastery levels.

Students can also view the same Individual student report you can view as a teacher. From the Learner home, students select Progress from the left side navigation.

In this report students can review their activity (content they’ve engaged with), when they completed each activity, any changes in skill level, and their score (correct/total problems). All student activity will show in this report even if it is not directly assigned by the teacher.

The student can use the center filter near the top of the page to filter content to only their mastery goals.

Note: If a student has more than one mastery goal, activity related to all mastery goals will show here.