Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments EPGY Math vs. ALEKS and/or CA Math Curriculum?

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