Review of ALEKS

Our family was given the opportunity to give ALEKS a try.  ALEKS stands for Assessment and LEarning in Knowledge Spaces and is basically a web-based tutor in math. 

At the website your student begins with a quick tutorial on how to use the ALEKS system.  Here is a sample of that screen.

Then your student will move on to an assessment of what they do and don't know.  They are then given a math program catered to mastering what that don't know.  If the student has already reached mastery in a certain area, they don't have a whole worksheet with those problems on it to wade through to get to the new stuff.  I really do LOVE that!  Here is a sample of the assessment screen.

After the assessment, the student is presented with a pie chart showing which areas they have mastered and which ones they have not.  As they master an area, they pie chart fills up. They also continue to assess the student periodically so that they can always be working on the areas that they need to work on. 

 And they send you, as a parent, the complete results of the assessment.  If you have more than one child like myself you can have one master account that contains all of your students.  Love that too!

After taking the assessment, you can see that there are links provided that your student can click on to go direct to the Learning Mode where corrections/answers are immediately given.  Once a student has demonstrated mastery in the Learning Mode, the item is added to the ALEKS Pie, and new topics may become available.

Students also have the ability to print out 16-question worksheets for additional practice or review. These worksheets are uniquely generated based on the student's current knowledge. The worksheet answer key is automatically sent to the Master Account via the ALEKS Message Center.

You can easily monitor all of your students in the master account screen.

The grade levels are 3-12 and they also have higher education options available.  I let Sarah (my 2nd grader) take the assessment as well and she really enjoyed doing the worksheets too.  She knew some of the material during her assessment so she had a little bit of her pie complete :)

ALEKS offers a free trial for yourself and your student so you can decide for yourself!  There is also a quick 2 minute video tour here.

A subscription to ALEKS can be purchased here for.......

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

For those who would use the program with multiple children like myself there is also a family discount.

Would our family purchase a subscription to ALEKS?  I'd have to say no.  There are several reasons why we would not.  The cost is too high for just being our math program.  Even with the family discount, it would cost as much as a whole curriculum.  And you've heard me say it before but Math is my favorite subject and one that I LOVE to teach so turning it over to a computer to do would be extremely hard for me.  I'm not saying I never will but the circumstances would have to be pretty near perfect =)

Don't forget to check out what my fellow crewmates thought of ALEKS.


**Disclaimer: I was given a subscription of this product for review purposes. I received no other compensation for this review. The opinions here are my true and honest evaluation.**