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.
5 topics an hour wouldn't worry me unduly, but if he's doing 10 topics an hour regularly, I suggest that he already knows the material and is working on things that are too easy.
Some probably are, but there's no way for me to just find and plug the holes. Holes certainly exist due to mismatch in the scope and sequence with what he's done before (Singapore and assorted problem solving), but it's not only time-consuming but prone to error to make assumptions based on abstracts of the scope and sequence of each.
Because the main reason for the interim assessements, as opposed to the regular ones, is to cement what's been recently learned. These are the great bulk of questions on them, perhaps the entirety-- they're more quizzes than level-setting assessments like the initial bigger one. But even though they're supposed to just cement knowledge, he doesn't need this every session, and it winds up wasting time he could be using to plow on ahead. It's more review than he needs, and the main reason is that he goes too quickly to suffer the lapse of time and memory which is the main reason for the existence of the interim assessments/quizzes in the first place, but also has much better long-term recall than average.
It's not useful to pile cement on top of cement, and I'm using ALEKS because I thought it would avoid this. It does to some extent, but it's just not ideal for someone who goes quickly and needs less review than normal. It would be better if there were more fine-grained control over the amount of review presented, and/or if the system had been more intelligently designed. Perhaps the system could tune itself over time for each student by tracking how little review each needed. Instead what seems to happen is that at predetermined intervals all students get a certain amount of review; they're just let out of the bulk of it if they re-demonstrate mastery (which for a fast learner might be done on a topic covered just the day before or even the same day).
The system's not totally inefficient, just not optimally efficient for kids at the higher end of the spectrum. And while ALEKS was designed with a good end in mind, a system that would adapt to the needs of the student, assumptions obviously based on the needs of more ordinary students have resulted in an implementation geared more to their needs.
Does your DS object to doing assessments frequently? Why? Is it possible that this is fixable?
He gets bored when he's forced to do extra questions on things he may have demonstrated mastery on just the previous day. I don't think it's a problem that needs to be fixed, since he has a good work ethic in general and his time could be better spent.
What other customization would you want, just out of curiosity?
I could work up a full list based on system design principles, but don't have the time. It's one of those situations where I was noticing tons of improvement opportunities as I used the interface, but didn't write them all down. They obviously tried to keep it simple for end users with the goal of improving the user experience, and to the extent that it obviously works fine for many people, they must have succeeded.
