Excellent! Do you have suitable materials for remediation? ALEKS is not good for word problems, because it has so few (with "substitute different numbers" being how it then generates questions - and it doesn't help that some of the number sets then end up being pretty weird, which doesn't encourage reasonableness checking).

I do always twitch, of course, when people's children have trouble with word problems, because I find it hard to imagine how someone can "really" understand the maths and yet not be able to do them: trouble with word problems does seem to me like a big red flag. But there are problems that can come from the artificiality of the situation, I know. Do you know what the core issue is for her? E.g., does she expect (from previous experience) the answers to be nice numbers, and so do the operation that makes the answer come out as a nice number, regardless of whether it's the right one? Or does she have problems with understanding the situation (i.e. even before you get to the maths) or what? Different kinds of remediation might be necessary, depending what the issue is.

Incidentally two of the things that have struck me about the AOPS geometry course (which, btw, is completely devoid of "word problems" - all pure geometry) relate to nice numbers. On the one hand, it doesn't have them - it's quite happy for an answer to come out as 29/60 and I have to check my urge to think "surely there's a mistake and it must really be 1/2". On the other hand, it does - I was tripped up on two early problems, in each of which the problem was soluble just because of particular properties of the numbers in it (e.g., they "happened" to lead to an isosceles triangle appearing somewhere); I had assumed the problem would be parametric in the numbers, i.e., that I should look for a general method into which to plug the given numbers, which wasn't the right strategy at all.


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