Personalized Math using ALEKS

Math shouldn't be too hard or too easy, it should be just right for YOU.  I started using ALEKS with struggling 8th graders in 2014.  Many of them had given up on learning math; they had gaps in their foundational knowledge and had reached a point where nothing made sense anymore.  They were subsisting on a diet of tricks that were confusing at best, and they had been way over their heads for years.  Within a week of introducing ALEKS to our classroom, I had students ask me why everyone wasn't using this program.  They finally felt successful, and they were able to add incrementally to their knowledge from a comfortable vantage point, one topic at a time.  Since then I have helped hundreds of students change how they felt about math, simply by making sure they were working on topics that they were actually ready to learn.

ALEKS (Assessment and LEarning in Knowledge Spaces) is a web-based, artificially intelligent assessment and learning system for grades 3–12. ALEKS uses adaptive questioning to quickly and accurately determine exactly what topics a student knows and doesn’t know in a course. ALEKS then guides each student along a pathway of topics they are most ready to learn.

ALEKS is purposefully designed to help educators:

• Identify instructional gaps.

• Personalize learning paths

• Track the progress of student learning and mastery

As a student works through a course, ALEKS periodically reassesses the student’s knowledge to ensure that topics learned are also retained. It’s an approach that has proven to create math confidence and measurable success for over 20 years.