DS6 has used ALEKS over the past few weeks off and on. The reason I specifically picked it was that I wanted to give him some time to brush up on his skills, without forcing him to do too much drill. (For nearly this entire spring semester he has not only been taught nothing mathematical at school but we haven't been afterschooling him, and we only fitfully afterschooled for the first half of the year. I'm just trying to get him back in form so we can proceed at this point.)
I don't know how much practice he is really getting. He goes through 5-10 topics per hour, based on difficulty and attention to detail at the time, even including drink and potty breaks. This has caused two areas of concern. First, I don't know that he's actually getting a decent amount of practice in each topic if he can complete them that quickly, although I guess I should just take this as a signal that his retention is high and his ability to fill in holes quickly is decent too. Second, every session ALEKS queues up a new interim assessment for him, and I have to call and get it cancelled (they are working to add support for parent cancellation of these, but the assessments were apparently implemented with the idea that a normal student would encounter them less frequently because they would do fewer topics per session).
One could say that these are just symptoms of mastery, but I know that DS gets a few wrong here and there and that he does need a brush-up. This makes me feel ambivalent about ALEKS. It doesn't seem ideal as skills practice for a highly gifted kid because of lack of customizability coupled with assumptions about learning at a normal pace; but it also doesn't seem ideal as a way to actually learn or teach new math concepts, because the bare-bones explanations don't qualify as lessons, though I am in favor of letting kids noodle through things on their own a good part of the time.
