Overview:
ALEKS uses artificial intelligence to assess students’ knowledge by giving them a pre-assessment and placing them in their course based on their answers helping them to work on the topics that they are ready to learn. The students have a pie graph that represents the total number of topics they have mastered along with the total number of topics in the course.
Students have the freedom to move through the topics in their pie graph and pick from a number of topics that are available to them. After selecting a topic, they read and study a tutorial to learn the concept. Then the student is expected to correctly answer 3 or 4 similar questions before the topic is considered mastered and then added to the pie graph.
Key Characteristics:
The student can test out of content and move ahead based on the outcome of the initial pretest. If the initial pretest indicates a mastery of less than 15%, the student is moved to the previous course. If the student tests at higher than 80%, that student is moved to the next course.
At any time students have between 5 and 20 choices of topics to work on.
This curriculum is VERY thorough–the typical gaps in a student’s math skills are solved with this curriculum. If a student earns a credit in pre-algebra via ALEKS, there is no doubt that the student is prepared for success in algebra.
The Mastery Checks continue to verify that a student’s mastery of an idea is solid. Students don’t slide by with “almost” knowing the content and getting lucky on a couple of sample problems.
Things to Think About:
There is no variety in how the material is presented; no secondary options when the student needs a second approach to a topic. There are no videos within the ALEKS curriculum itself. However, some ALEKS courses do include BWA teacher-created videos.
If a student’s knowledge in a topic isn’t solid, the Mastery Checks will remove pie-slices and send the student back to redo that topic. If students don’t know that this is possible, they may get frustrated.