Remedial work and the incentive problem – An attempt to reach underachieving students
How to use Khan Academy as a tool for remedial work for students on vacation? - Remedial Work - Definition: An activity or set of activities designed to help underachieving students learn what they could not during the regular school period and provide them with a chance to increase their scores in that quarter. Here in Brazil this is known as 'Recuperação'.
General topic of interest
Different strategies for makeup work are my general topic of interest. I have a personal interest in this topic because, as a student, I was often underachieving, which meant I always had remedial work to do for a number of subjects. However, back then, the remedial work was a single test the student took to try to show teachers and the school that they were able to learn what they could not during the school year. I now understand that many more variables come into play during a written test than what the student knows or does not know. For this reason, I found it interesting and meaningful to search for different strategies for remedial work.
Participants
Amauri Pellizzer / Felipe Molina
Literature Review
We looked into the works of Maddox, M. (2009). called "Blended Learning: The Internet and the Classroom" and Rienties, B., Rehm, M., & Dijkstra, J. (2005). called "Remedial Online Teaching In Theory and in Practice; Online Summer Course. Balance Between Summer and Course".
Data collecting approach
We collected the data provided by the Khan Academy platform about students progress in different topics and the time they spent on activities in the platform.
Data collection tools/resources
A survey was done with students that did not engage with the platform. However, not many students answered it.
Emerging results
Due to the lack of data, we were not able to properly analyze and draw conclusions about the availability of this particular platform as a method for remedial work during the holidays.
Reflections
We reflected on why the students did not engage with the platform and created hypothesis. Then, we looked into what students said on the survey. This information was used to decide how to move forward for the next remedial work programs.
