Some background:
So far this year, our son finished 4th & 5th grade math using ALEKS, followed by passing the school's own end-of-year tests for each grade (90% and 97% respectively) to satisfy the district math requirements.

He was scheduled to begin the 6th grade math curriculum through EPGY on Dec 1, but because of the lag time, he started with the ALEKS program for 6th to keep himself busy during class. (His school allows him to do his math on-line during the normal math time for his class.)

He scored an 85% on the 6th grade initial assessment for ALEKS, worked for a couple of weeks to finish the remaining topics, and then scored 94% on the school's end-of-year test for 6th.

My question:
Is EPGY different enough from CA standards (and/or ALEKS) that he would truly benefit by re-taking 6th grade w/EPGY, or would he be fine starting out with Pre-algebra w/EPGY instead?

This is partly financial, in that I don't want to pay for the full 5th/6th grade EPGY course to maybe give him the benefit of just a fraction of the second half of that course, but I also don't want to put my son through the drudgery of the 6th grade EPGY curriculum if it is largely the same as ALEKS.

Any advice would be appreciated!

Why would you pay for the individual program rather than use the Open Enrollment Group? Then you could have access up to prealgebra for $135, and if needed you could add Intro to Algebra for $50 if needed between now and May 2010. Unless it is a requirement of the school? You will still have access to his reports you just wouldn't get a certificate of completion, just the material you can print for your records. Then it wouldn't be an financial issue.

I think there are a few things covered in EPGY 5th/6th that aren't covered in ALEKS, at least from my DD's experience, she did ALEKS as well before EPGY, whether they are necessary I can't say, we are just starting prealgebra now.

This is going through his school and although they are paying for it, I do not want to waste their money (ultimately mine, right?) on a fraction of a course.

The school is requiring that we use the tutor-ized version and will be using the results from whatever tests/quizzes/homework are generated for DS's grades.

I really know spit about EPGY (can you tell?) so all this may change once we finally get our feet wet.

Thanks so much for your thoughts on this.

If that's the case I would probably pull the scope and sequence and compare them to see what would be missing. That way you might be able to easily cover whatever material is missing on your own.

You would think it would be cheaper for the school to access the open enrollment program themselves, jeez they could do it for more than a dozen kids and still save money over the individual program. But hey, I'm just a lowely parent.

I suggested to our school GT coordinator that dd#2's school consider using the open enrollment program too b/c they have a few kids using it for math in school (parents pay). She didn't think that they would be interested despite the savings b/c it doesn't have the tutor thing. My guess would be that the tutor aspect serves like the available parent -- to answer questions -- and that the school doesn't want to make someone available to fill that role at school.

It would be my guess also that schools don't want to have to provide a tutor for the program. If the parents are paying for the traditional program, there's no responsibility on them.

Now if the school is paying for the traditional program, it would be less expensive for them to let parents pay for the open enrollment(I'm sure many would be willing), and provide the tutor.

One thing that comes to mind is that EPGY covers sets (unions, intersections, etc.) in all grades (at least from 3 on - we've used 3 and are now using 5). I agree with the above - check out the scope and sequence and compare them carefully. That said, EPGY has so many exercises and the program won't let you skip what you already know. I doubt your DS would want to repeat 80% of what he's already mastered. You might be better off having him move forward and going back to fill in the gaps.

Thanks Questions. I have the course outlines side-by-side and am trying to cross-reference. I have a call into EPGY to get a little more detail directly from them, as I recall reading discussions involving Melissa's group that the instructor has some control over the pacing.

Our son is very keen on ALEKS' approach to pacing, in that he only needs 3-in-a-row (or whatever) to move to the next item, and that as long as he continues to demonstrate understanding at assessment (as well as our own created worksheets) he doesn't have to revisit topics in any detail.

If EPGY is radically different and requires tons of repetition on stuff he already knows, I'll have to start sleeping with one eye open lest he choose to exact his revenge on me.

There are two settings. One of these days I'm going to have time to run a few lessons in both settings to see the real difference for myself.

I'll agree with Questions, unless you find that you can have the program adjusted as MelMichigan suggested, and the adjustment is significant.

You said your son is keen on Aleks' pacing of moving on after three correct answers in a row. Honestly, EPGY has a lot more repitition than that. My DD likes it generally, but it can be a bit repetitive, even when you don't miss any answers.

My DD used ALEKS into level 6 and is now using EPGY. She did not retain as well in the end with ALEKS. She filled her pie and passed all the assessments but I don't think it truely stuck. She needs the actual "teaching" versus examples as she gets higher into math. Then again, she is good at, but doesn't "love" math either.

If he did that well on the end of year assessment I would just look at materials that might be different. It took my DD about 20 hours (rough estimate here) to complete a level of EPGY. That's a lot of repetition if he knows the material well.

Dandy- would you mind sharing how you were able to get his own Math into the school? Did you reccomend that he did this and they knew it was best because he had the right test scores? Did you suggest the Math programs like Alex or did they? Did they have any concerns about developmental issues and accelloration? This is my school's issue.

My DS used Aleks for 3 and 4 and never did more than the minimum number of questions, which means he just whipped through it (not happily, of course - he prefers some audiovisual elements, too). Still, I think it was math light. He learned how to do things, but I can't really say it made a lasting impression. Also, there is little to no problem-solving. No sure what there is on EPGY, as I don't recall from the 3rd grade program.

btw, my DS absolutely hated math after EPGY3. Thought it was excrutiatingly boring. Funny thing is that he now likes EPGY5. A surprise to me - but it's probably b/c it's been things other than straight + and - calculations, and the fact that "Mr. EPGY" now says things like "awesome" and a little tune plays. lol.

So, Questions and Melmichigan,

Your impression was that Aleks doesn't cover the material as well as might be needed, or that there wasn't enough review? I looked at it briefly, but have no experience.

The bottom line is that because the school had no familiarity with the program, I had to show that ALEKS "worked" for our son by doing it at home first, and the fact that he tested so well on the 4th grade math made them willing to try.

We hadn't received any formal test results back, so the decision was based purely on his actual performance.

Their decision was certainly helped along by my promise to handle everything including payment, system configuration, quizzes and homework generation. They didn't have to do anything except say "yes."

After the IQ & Achievement test results came back, it was the district office that made the decision to make EPGY available to him for whatever we wanted.

When you did Alex did he work at 4h Grade level at home while in 4th Grade? How long did you do this so they felt comfortable he could do the program? Did you generate Reports from Alex and present them to the school?

Does alex have anything out of the box of traditional schooling like Math logic or puzzles?

It's hard to tell. He definitely learned it - and his SCAT score went up about 35 points b/n 2nd and 3rd grade spring. Maybe with more repetition he would have become faster, but then again, he'd tolerate the program less. I just wonder how much he got out of a program that took less than 2 mos. for 4th grade, when he didn't work on it everyday. Then again, there is so much repetition b/n grades - all elementary curriculum seems to spiral. After third grade, he placed into about 4.5, after 4th grade, he placed into 5.6+. Also, he did no math over the summer, and this fall he couldn't exactly remember how to multiply large numbers (3 digit by 4 digit or whatever). Now, we're doing an assortment of everything, as it's very hard to switch b/n math curricula as they teach in different orders and different subjects in different grades.

Also, for whomever asked the question, we're homeschooling. He was in public school for second grade, and since he knew most everything they were teaching, I had him do EPGY3 and Elementary Problem Solving I through CTY b/c I didn't want him just sitting there. But the acceleration (which was really only picking up where his previous private school had left off in first grade) created more problems for him in the classroom.

It's never easy, is it?

fyi, our public school allows the kids in 4th and 5th to work on Aleks in the classroom once they demonstrate that they know the topic being taught that week. They do in-class differentiation. As it was explained to me during our tour last spring as we considered our options for this year, if DS already knows long division, he'd be expected to listen to the instruction as to how to do it, but wouldn't need to work the same problems the class was using. He'd be given other more interesting/difficult problems that would involve long division, and then would be given Aleks time - or something like that. Our district has no gifted services other than in-class differentiation until 6th grade honors math.

I just mention that b/c I wonder what other options there are other than acceleration in schools which won't accommodate the advanced and/or gifted kids. It really was a tough decision for us - let him sit there and be miserable, or let him move forward and be miserable...

And I don't recall any (math) logic or puzzles in Aleks.

He completed the ALEKS 4th Grade level during July '09, the month before the start of school.

I didn't bother with any of the reports, other than to share a "for teachers" page with them describing the alignment with state curriculum. (Which I don't think was ever read.)

Because ALEKS allows the student to work in a largely self-directed fashion, I think it would be difficult for the student to take any test showing grade level competency until the course is essentially finished.

Our son's progress didn't follow the school's text book at all, as he was effectively tackling parts of multiple chapters at the same time.

Unless the school has some meaningful familiarity with ALEKS -- or is willing to do the research on its own -- convincing the school to permit in-class replacement would be a tough challenge.

If I had done this mid-year, I would have had DS complete the course on his own, after school, and then request that he be permitted to take the end-of-year test for the school to demonstrate mastery of their curriculum.

Then, if he tested high enough, I would request that he be allowed to take the next level in ALEKS as an in-class replacement.

Do not, however, allow him to take their test until you've personally reviewed their curriculum to make sure ALEKS covered everything. I found a handful of differences where he would have been tripped up by terminology. I also had him review some earlier math concepts that his school covered in 4th, but ALEKS didn't. (One example is that ALEKS doesn't discuss "outliers" [in reference to Mean v. Median] until 5th, while the school addressed the concept in 4th.)

In the end, though, requiring 30+ minutes/day from my son -- on top of regular school work -- would have been less than pleasurable for him, so taking this mid-year approach would not have been as easy as an over-the-summer effort.

Go to their website, www.ALEKS.com and sign up for a free trial. You can have your son go through the assessment for his grade (or any other) and tinker around with everything.

**I WISH EPGY ALLOWED TEST-DRIVES LIKE THIS**
(**HINT-HINT, STANFORD & CTY!**)

This has been my concern since starting with ALEKS. His completing 3rd, 4th & 5th grade levels in about four weeks each, and 6th in just over two weeks really bothered me.

I've tried to pin ALEKS down on the speed issue, but they are unwilling to answer anything other than to say that students are not allowed to move forward until ALEKS is satisfied that they've mastered a particular concept.

They won't say how much time the typical student requires to finish a level, and they don't have any information about long-term retention.

I've searched around quite a bit and the only parental feedback I find is from other giftie families -- and most seem to have the same concern about the speed, but so far nobody has outright said that ALEKS left their child unprepared for the next level outside of ALEKS. And given the parental penchant for complaining, if there were such experiences, they'd be publicized.

I'd love to know how ALEKS works for kids closer to the middle of the curve... do they go smokin' through as well? I've not seen anything like this, and ALEKS sure won't divulge.

But after I back up several steps from this concern, I know that my son learns things very rapidly, and once he learns something, it tends to stick. Considering also the GT-Ed info that reminds teachers & parents that gifties generally need less repetition -- and often MUCH less -- than is typical, his pacing does begin to make sense.

He's starting EPGY on 12/1, and I am eagerly awaiting a first-hand comparison.

Dandy - thanks so much. Please do keep us posted. It's so wonderful your sons school is supporting this.

Sorry to make this the "All ALEKS, All the Time" channel, but I have one last comment (for now, anyhow).

When I switched our son over from 5th to 6th in ALEKS, his initial assessment showed him 85% complete for 6th. This made absolutely no sense to me, as I assumed that there'd be more new material than that to which he'd not yet been exposed. He's a smart kid and all, but c'mon.

It took a few calls to get someone at ALEKS to talk with me about this in any detail. In their program, the feller said, there is considerable overlap between the grades, just like in the state curriculum (according to him). And that because my son had already finished 5th inside of ALEKS, they didn't test him on anything in 6th that was already covered in 5th. In fact, the "placement" or "initial" assessment only asked him about 35 questions in all (mostly on new concepts), totally ignoring anything that he'd already "mastered" in the 5th grade level.

I'm tempted to have him take the assessment again as a new ALEKS student (via a free test drive) to see how he'd do. But I've got bigger fish to tackle and other metaphors to mix.

Then again, he did hit 94% on his school's end-of-year test for 6th, so go figure.

fwiw, I've heard that if you call them, they can open up a lot more topics on each grade (i.e., add more topics to each grade's "pie"). There is more there. They just don't make it available as a matter of course b/c they think most people don't want it.

Ah, that's interesting. Was 5th the first level he did, or did you experience different behaviour on the switch from 4th to 5th, say? [ETA: ah, you answered this upthread, sorry. So the question becomes: did you see the same behaviout of the system at each level switch, or did you see the same as I did that it prefilled the pie between 3 and 4 but not between 4 and 5, or what?] If you look at the topic lists, basically the list for level n is a subset of the list for level n+1 at least up to 6th. So it does make sense that if someone gets 100% on level n they have a pretty filled pie on level n+1. Our experience was mixed, though: when I switched DS6 from 3rd to 4th, he got an automatically partly filled pie, but when I switched him from 4th to 5th, he had to do a new initial assessment, which didn't have nearly enough questions to "spot" how much he already knew, and so he ended up having to redo a lot of topics. I'm not sure why the difference happened: in both cases, as far as I recall, he got 100% on the final assessment and then I switched him in the same way. This repetition has a lot to do with his frustration with ALEKS lately, so I'm keen to get the partly-filled pie when we switch him to 6th. (I'd be quite happy to call it a day with ALEKS, but DS is determined he's going to finish 5th, do 6th, and then do high school chemistry! We'll see.) I had actually promised DS that when he gets to 90% done on level 5 I'll email the ALEKS people and ask about this - but an alternative would be to assume it'll just work, and secretly log in as him and do the missing topics if it doesn't work, I guess :-)

Incidentally I'd disrecommend having your DS go in as a new student and do the assessment: if you think about it, regardless of how much information they have about the dependecies, it's not plausible that they can test knowledge of the 266 (is it?) topic of ALEKS5 in one assessment. The assessment may work in checking what kind of level to start at, but it can't possibly be reliable at the level of finding small holes, when it starts from scratch as opposed to from a history of what the student has done.

I went back to my notes and I remember now having the pie coming up after 4->5 level change, but not 3->4. I thought the 4->5 pie was an error and requested a new assessment.

Yup. I don't see anything from L5 that is not included in L6.

Whole numbers stays the same with 79 topics in both L5 and L6, with identical content. Everything else gets reshuffled (adding a handful of topics to each slice), with the only new category being Probability.

The bottom line is that of the 324 total topics in L6, my son got "credit" for the 266 topics he mastered in L5 (automatically 82% of L6), plus a few other things that he already knew, which gave him the starting point of 85%.

The ALEKS rep I spoke with said that she routinely has the faster students move from L4 to L6, skipping L5 entirely because of the extensive (total?) overlap.

Overall, I'm still pleased with ALEKS with respect to my son's advancement and mastery from L3->L6. He really enjoyed the pacing, and so far everything is "sticking."

EPGY starts on 12/1, and after comparing the course detail between ALEKS & EPGY, there's more than enough new material to warrant him starting with Grade 6 @ EPGY.

I'm here to learn. Please keep sharing as much as you can because you are helping me.

Ha, the opposite way round to what we saw. I think I'll email them at some point. Probably depends on whether you move the mouse widdershins or whatever the opposite of widdershins is at some crucial moment :-)

I'll be really interested to hear how you get on with it, especially whether you manage to get it to be paced correctly for your son, since that seems to be some people's reservation about it. As DS is not that keen on ALEKS right now, we're doing mostly sporadic things, though I'm using syllabus lists as one source of ideas for things to bring up. Three figure bearings, polar coordinates and the connection with Pythagoras' thm today (but no trig yet!) prompted by a combination of a Murderous Maths episode and the first of the Dimensions videos that we watched the other day (they are great!), followed by re-watching that and another episode, and then he insisted on doing an Eratosthenes' sieve with zillions of coloured pens, again. Not bad for a Friday afternoon after a week of school. Surely better for his mathematical development than following a syllabus really, given that he does have school, but I find that *I* hanker after that handrail, somehow!

I think it might be little of both. Then again it had became a major fight to get me DD to use it by the time I called it quits. I still have a few months left that my youngers are using for quicktables because the subscriptions are paid for but wouldn't be used otherwise (wish I'd never signed up for so long).

My DD will explain that she would "forget" how to do something from the time she was first shown it and did the problems correctly to when she was asked it on assessment. (I see they have added a quiz option that wasn't there when she was using it.)

My DD only scores low 140's in math from her testing two years ago. I had her go back and start at 4.5 with EPGY and review forward when we started it. She says she is remembering more with EPGY "definately".

(I asked these questions of her so you would get her view on the programs.) HTH

It's hard for me to tell. I think it's my DS more than the program. And whether or not he moves from 4th to 5.7 or 5.0 is irrelevant. The program doesn't repeat while you're in it - you just keep moving ahead. I don't think they expect anyone to enter at the bottom of the grade unless the student is new to the program and places there by their placement test. My DS did learn using Aleks, but I don't think the skills were solidified the way they could have been had he been writing out the answers and doing more problems. Of course, he could have done more problems on paper instead of in his head, and he could have done more problems, but chose not to. I also wondered what he got out of it if he went through it so quickly. I'm just amused that he likes EPGY now. Last year, he hated EPGY and liked Aleks. He says he likes EPGY now b/c of the music when he gets the answer right and b/c it's easy. We're not there yet, lol!