Polarbear, I mostly agree with you. I'm also a card carrying, employed scientist. However, getting the basics of showing my work in algebra carried me a long ways into college, and having the skills in place when I got to college allowed me to excel in places peers struggles.
OTOH, that's all totally discounting the value of getting graded on showing your work!
The struggle DD's having in showing her work is that she's adopted a short hand for whipping out the ALEKS solutions that is really wrong. So now we're dealing with stuff getting marked wrong, and there are habits to undo.
Add me to the list of people who would rather just unplug the computers in math class.
My kids have never struggled with word problems, and indeed, tend to see the answer more readily than in a purely numerical problem. In our house, going deeper rather than further has come through learning about things like fractals and paper folding.
To the OP: SiaSL has the right numbers on the topics. The lower level content isn't removed from what the kids might access until 7th grade level. It's there so that kids doing remediation on ALEKS won't be obviously placed downwards.
I don't think that showing these results to the gifted teacher will result in much. What's your goal with using ALEKS?
