Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Recommended Resources IXL or ALEK math???

The Alcumus portion of AoPS is free, a great boon for us, indeed.

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I did call Aleks people and they never mentioned anything about the settings. I will try them again to ask your question. The teacher says she is not familiar with the program and has dropped promoting it. Aleks people told me it only takes an hour to get familiar. I have also thought he should move up a grade but no one seems to agree. At this point he has a bad attitude with Aleks and he would need a teacher to promote it and help him. The teacher also feels he is not proactive enough about keeping himself moving on independent projects, which I have seen at home. He learns well on his own but can get stalled not taking charge.

They admit the regular class pace is too slow for DS but don't seem to be able to do anything about it. I may have hit a wall with this Math. DS has a C in Math this semester and he should be a A student.

Next year, if this all stays the same. We will have the same problem. The teacher says all the students are going the same pace. I have a talented math student that seems to be losing interest. How sad.

Assuming your DS knows his username and password, it sounds as though it would be useful to have him log in at home where you can see what he's doing and see what's going on here. I have read around ALEKS quite a lot (research interest as well as a DS doing it) and haven't seen any sign that it has a mode other than the usual one where you pick a topic, answer a few questions on it, and get it on your pie. If it's just that all the topics currently available to him are easy, but he can't face doing the easy questions to show it, then someone needs to click on "do a new assessment now" or whatever the option is called, in the parent/teacher interface. Then the system will reassess him and give him a chance to skip over easy stuff.

I think DS took an assessment in the beginning. Should the Aleks people be able to look up the assessment? He has put 2 hrs on the program and it looks like he has 50% of the pie complete. DS mentioned being frustrated because he said the program thinks he doesn't know division. I'm not sure what to think, but if the teacher does not support the program, we can't get anywhere.

At home,DS took an assessment on line from http://www.tenmarks.com/asdoAssessmentInit.action and scored 85% on 5th grade math, but they thought it might not be higher level thinking. He is at a GT school. I think there were 20 questions.

The whole idea was that he would do Aleks so his pace would be more appropriate. It seems he is stuck doing the regular class work at a too slow pace, going along with the class.

The only other solution I can think of is if he had indivual help from another teacher/tudor. I don't think they have the resources for this.

The assessment fills in as much of the pie as the system can deduce that he knows from the assessment - since each course includes a lot of pre-requisite material that most people starting the course will already have, 50% is actually pretty low as a starting point IME. Is he prone to careless mistakes? It may be that he made a lot of slips on the initial assessment with the result that he has lots of conceptual knowledge - e.g. of division! - that didn't show up as correct answers to the assessment questions. In that case, the right way to proceed is definitely to have him do a new assessment, warning him to be more careful this time, since ALEKS can't usually tell the difference between a slip and a more serious failure of understanding! The teacher should be prepared to click for a new assessment, even if she isn't pushing the use of ALEKS, surely.

How many questions are on the initial assessments? How long does the assessment take?

Between 20 and 25 questions - but it has a lot of information about the prerequisite relationships between topics, and the questions are carefully selected by the system to home in on where he's at (it's very clever, I do recommend reading the Research behind ALEKS section!) so it gets more information than you'd think possible with so few questions. One or two careless slips don't seem to mess it up much - the underlying theory does take account of them - but a lot would. It's supposed to take about 20 mins, but it's common for younger children to take much longer.

I like the idea of him bringing home his password and username so the two of you can figure it out together. I can't believe that the teacher is allowed to 'get away with' dropping the program like that at a gifted school. I would propose you ask the school to assign someone else who is more computer savy to adminsiter Alexs to your son in a different room while the other kids do math.

My son atually needed me to sit next to him while he did Aleks in 4th grade. Apparently if you make an addition error or other careless mistake, the program thinks you don't understand the current topic and gives you lots more questions to practice on. IF your son makes lots of simple mistakes, he might be spending away lot of time on simple errors.

What we worked out in the beginning was for him to do the problems and then I would check it on a calculator before he typed in the numbers and then he would check that he had typed in the answer correctly, and then I would check it before he hit 'send.' After a few days, he would do the problem, then double check himself in order to earn me to come by with the magic calculator and tell him if he needed to check again.

It was painful at first, but did wonders for his attention to detail. Talk about high stakes!

Bottom line is that your son is at a gifted school that is committed to meeting his academic needs, and you might be needed to pipe up and let them know there is a problem (although I think the C in the gradebook might be a clue!)

Love and More Love,
Grinity

I'm thinking... if there were only 20-25 questions it should be pretty easy for someone to look at other Placement assessments and see how they stack up. He said he had problems with filling in some anwsers and the program was not working properly. Sometimes he blames his problems on others/otherthings.

It seems to me he is not getting the attention needed to make the plan happen. I think the teacher is too maxed out on time. I wonder is it not possible to get this type of differentiation, (like with Aleks) because he is not independent enough OR did he just not get a good enough start with it and not enough structure/planning? OR is it not good for him.

I think I will speak up again.

I wish somebody had the time for him who could figure out his needs and try to meet them.

It's not that simple, because *which* 20-25 questions you get is dependent on how you're doing. (In a nutshell, the next question it asks you is one which it is as uncertain as possible about whether you'll be able to answer - that way it gets the information about what you can do as quickly as possible. Fictional example: if it asked you 23 x 19 and you got it right, it might later ask you 549 x 10057, but if you got it wrong, it might later ask you 6 x 7.)

However, the topic lists from here are detailed enough that someone should be able to compare that with any other assessment he's done.

Odd behaviour does happen sometimes. We've noticed, for example, that using the back button is a really bad idea in assessments (I'm still not sure quite what happened the time DS did!)

It sounds likely that he's got in a pickle with the initial asssesment and just needs someone to watch him do another assessment and then make sure he knows how to use the program. He shouldn't need much in the way of supervision after that. I'd say it's worth perservering.