New Common Core Math Missions Launch on Khan Academy

On the keynote stage in Palm Springs, CA for this year’s CUE conference, Sal Khan announced a brand new launch for US students this afternoon. Khan Academy is an organization committed to helping teachers and students by continually working to provide every student a personalized learning experience.

This year it became clear that it was time to offer a Common Core Resource that both students and teachers could rely on in order to transition smoothly and successfully to these state standards without giving up the idea of personalized learning. The Khan team basically saw two options for developing this sort of resource: retroactively linking all their current resources to the most appropriate common core standard or go ahead and create a entire new library of content and learning objects, specifically to illustrate the Common Core standards.

Today, Khan announced they decided to take the harder of the two roads and are proud to unveil their comprehensive set of brand new student missions directly linked to the Common Core Kindergarten thru High School Math Standards. These learning mission and brand new activities are correlated with brain science research to enable to students to level up and develop mastery of every skill detailed in the standards.

The content is designed by math educators who chose to submit their own examples of problems they created to teach certain standards. Many interested educators applied but Khan picked the 40 teachers they felt submitted the most creative and effective sample problems, starting with Kindergarten all the way up through high school. From there, they supplied the teachers with extensive training on the Common Core. They also partnered with Smarter Balanced to receive feedback and ensure the problems aligned precisely to each standard.

Students, either with their classmates and teacher or as individuals working from home, will start the new math common core mastery missions with a quick pretest in order to enter at the appropriate level and then launch onto a cue of activities curated to fit them, personally. From the teacher perspective, the new Common Core resource makes it very easy for teachers to find the learning activities they need because they can search by subject and grade level and now also by each standard.

This announcement comes on the heels of another new tool Khan is developing through a  partnership with College Board to provide free, world-class test prep for the new SAT. Here is a link to our new SAT landing page, including a 4 minute conversation between David Coleman (College Board CEO) and Sal Khan.