ALEKS: A TOS Review

Sacha’s<25: A web based math curriculum for grades 3-12.  By using adaptive questioning this program knows what to teach your child and when they are ready to learn it.

Home in the Trenches Product Rating (out of 10 stars)

Is it worth our time?  9 stars
Did it help us learn?  9 stars
Is it worth the money? 7 stars
Is it useful to me?  9 stars
Practicality- 9 stars
Quality-  9 stars
Kid Rating-  9 stars

What is ALEKS?

Assessment and LEarning in Knowledge Spaces is a Web-based, artificially intelligent assessment and learning system. ALEKS uses adaptive questioning to quickly and accurately determine exactly what a student knows and doesn’t know in a course. ALEKS then instructs the student on the topics she is most ready to learn. As a student works through a course, ALEKS periodically reassesses the student to ensure that topics learned are also retained. ALEKS courses are very complete in their topic coverage and ALEKS avoids multiple-choice questions. A student who shows a high level of mastery of an ALEKS course will be successful in the actual course she is taking.

ALEKS also provides the advantages of one-on-one instruction, 24/7, from virtually any Web-based computer for a fraction of the cost of a human tutor.

What I liked:

• It keeps track of everything for me.  It remembers when to test them (either after learning so many new topics or a specified amount of time they have spent using the program)
• The boys eagerly did their math each day
• It was online and can be done anywhere…no textbooks if you are traveling.
• It had a nice amount of problems for each topic.  If they could answer 3 of them correctly it would let them move onto a new topic.  If they got the problem wrong they would need to do another one, until they had done 3 correctly. They would then have to review it the next day to make sure they still understood the topic.
• ALEKS emailed me a student report every 2 weeks.
• I loved how it would keep track and have reports of how long they have been on each day as well as which topics they are ready to learn and what ones they will still need to learn.
• GREAT customer service! I had to call because ALEKS wasn’t working on my husband’s laptop….they quickly were able to diagnose the problem and tell us what we needed to update on our computer to make it work!

What I didn’t like:

• I was hoping that this program would make math completely “hands off” for mom!  Unfortunately this was not the case…the kids still needed me to read over the explanations with them.
• We have a lot of kids….this program isn’t as cost effective to use.  You aren’t able to purchase a grade level and use it over again.  They do give a discount for multiple children.
• It isn’t very visually fun to look at.  I know this is totally a personal preference.  I like color on math pages, others find it distracting.  Most of the problems are just black and white.
• Having more than 1 child on the program meant that my computer was unavailable for a chunk of each day…something to consider if you only have 1 computer and lots of learners!

To sum it up: 

The boys both really enjoyed this program and doing math on the computer vs workbook style learning.  Depending on how your child learns math best, this might be a great fit for you family!  They offer a free trial!  What a great way to see if this will work for your student!

The important information:

Order from: http://www.aleks.com/

Price: 

A subscription to ALEKS is

• $19.95 per student, per month, or
• only $99.95 every 6 months, or
• only $179.95 every 12 months.

Learn about the  family discount program.

To read what other crew members had to say about ALEKS click here.

Disclosure/Disclaimer:  I received the above product free of charge for review purposes.  I am only expected to give an honest review.