Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion ALEKS Issues

Ok,
so my 12 year old, gifted son is really struggling in math.
He was tested (not with my blessing) and was determined to have an IQ off the chart whatever that means. He has the typical gifted social issues but has found an accepting clique.
So here is my issue. His school uses ALEKS in Math which is the only non HA class he is in. He struggles with concepts and retention and has mild ADD. I use models, examples, real world applications and he still cannot retain the information. He gets great grades in every other class.
I think the format of ALEKS is lacking in that if the student gets 2-3 correct answers, they move on to the next subject.
Does anyone else have issues with ALEKS and if you do, do you have any suggestions. Thanks

We used ALEKS at home, not at school, and we"be used it both with our kids who pick up math concepts quickly and our dd who is math-concept-challenged. I think the teacher should be able to set a parameter in ALEKS to require more than three correct answers to master a topic, but I'm not absolutely certain of that. Do you have access to your child's ALEKS account as a parent? If you do, you can create custom quizzes really easily to give your child extra practice in modules they are either working on or modules they've completed.

I loved ALEKS for supplementing at home and for self-paced learning for kids who are naturally math-brained, but the weakness of ALEKS is that it's just practice and written explanations - if your child doesn't have supporting teaching both in explanations and help with answering questions at school I can't imagine it would work as a curriculum for a child who is not math-inclined.

polarbear

ALEKS appears to be useful for a small subset of the population.

I have a lot of criticisms to level at it, but realize that he can keep choosing to do additional problems on a skill even once ALEKS has determined that your son has mastered it.

A few ideas based on what we're doing in my house: I have started requiring that my daughter
*print off and file into a binder all explanations she reads.
*write out her solutions to the problem as if they were homework to hand into her teacher, neatly and in a notebook, and
*do as many of the topics in a cluster at the same time, so she has to work through only fractions problems until she runs out before moving to topics on another pie or even another flavor of subtopic with a pie slice.

This seems to help. My daughter, however, does not struggle with math, yet ALEKS is successfully teaching her to hate math.

Can you say a bit more about how his struggle is showing up and what kind of conceptual trouble he has? Is it that he can do a question type to get his 2-3 questions right, but then can't do the same question type when he gets it in an assessment? Or is he progressing through ALEKS but unengaged, or what? What kind of thing is he not retaining?

Thanks for the suggestions one and all.
He is engaged and excited to get a new concept, but when he tests or does an assessment, he scores in the 70 percentile.
He has a level equivalent book that has most topics included which has helped a bit.
I do believe that he is struggling with some of the "foundation" ideas and concepts so I am very concerned that unless he gets a hold of this, he will continue to tread water, be frustrated, and hate math.