I had read a little about ALEKS in various places before this review opportunity came up. I had not been to the website to check it out, but was intrigued. When we received our trial period to review, I needed to make a decision on which of my learners to “assign” this to. My older girls are both working at a roughly 3-4th grade level in math, but are not real crazy about math. They struggle with new concepts and would choose to not do math if it were up to them. I also have a math lover, working at 3rd grade level who catches on to new concepts easily. She was the obvious choice.
But what really is ALEKS? Assessment and LEarning in Knowledge Spaces. It is web-based and complete for mathematics for grades 3-12. Using artificial intelligence to match the understanding of your child, different concepts are presented. Your child can choose which area to focus on. When something else is needed to be learned to advance further in that area, no more topics will be available until the foundation skills are completed. This works well for both mastery and spiral learners. You can read more about the research behind ALEKS from their website.
ALEKS can be your sole math curriculum or serve as a tutor to fill in gaps or catch-up skills to where your child “should” be. We personally don’t measure our children to peer accomplishments based upon their age, but look at their own progress and effort. I like to see them pushing a bit to learn more and not be satisfied with minimum efforts. ALEKS fits in well with this philosophy for our family. It also enables my children to learn a concept in a different way than what I am showing them.
That is not my daughter’s pie above, but a sample. You can see the different topics represented by different wedges with those concepts mastered represented by the darker portion near the center. The concepts available (the next step, foundation concepts mastered, etc.) are the green links in the box that is opened. If your child needs or wants more practice, it is easy to choose. If you want to print off worksheets to further work on a concept, that is available as well.
When completing the initial assessment, my chosen learner complained throughout because there was so much she didn’t know (it is supposed to be hard, testing on a full range of mathematics.) I was quite pleased with how she placed. She could see on her pie that she is really strong in a few areas yet needs to work a little more on others. She is reluctant to work on areas that she doesn’t “get” right away. She has benefitted from having the different explanations presented through ALEKS. Her sisters have been in the room at the same time she has been working, so I asked the girls what they thought of it. Neither was interested in trying any part of it. It was not engaging to them; they found it to be intimidating. Neither one is very responsive to learning in this type of environment. They will spend some time playing creative games at the computer, but it is not a preferred activity. My chosen learner (guinea pig?) really does well with this computer based learning. Even when she struggled with some of the newer concepts, she was still asking to do this regularly. She was only limited by our lack of additional computers. If I had based my review on one of my older daughters’ experience, this would not be very favorable. Every child is different, so I strongly urge you to take advantage of the free trial (see the link below).
I like the reports I can receive via e-mail showing what progress has been made. There are also many other options available in the master accounts section when you are logged in. This makes tracking the progress of multiple children working at multiple levels easy.
There is an area of ALEKS called QuickTables. This is math fact practice for addition, subtraction and multiplication. There are games in this area. We haven’t fully explored this (well, I haven’t, my daughter tells me it is a lot of fun!) so I don’t know what the games are like.
How would you like to check out ALEKS for your own family? There is a special offer for homeschool families–you won’t find it from their main page–for a 2 month trial. The trial talked about through much of their site gives you 3 hours to use in a 48 hr period. This trial (that you can access from the graphic below) will give you a thorough trial.
To continue using ALEKS, the cost is $19.95/month. You can save by getting 6 or 12 months at once. There are also family packages to make it an even better deal for your family.
To read about other families’ experiences with ALEKS, be sure to read their reviews on the TOS Crew blog.