From September 2004 until the present, ALEKS has been used with 80 students of Dennis Ashendorf.
ALEKS adapts to each student's current knowledge and frequently retests that knowledge. All numbers in problems are randomized so that no student gets the same questions to answer. All answers are constructed without multiple choice. This is similar to the MCWeb software for Chemistry developed at CSU Fullerton. ALEKS is a spinoff of UC Irvine. It has a cost of $35 per license per year.
One out of three students prefer to use the computer which minimizes interactions between teachers and students. Of these, 80% stay with the software approach. ALEKS tells each student what they have mastered and offers them choices on what objectives he or she is allowed to work on next. Objectives are only allowed to be worked on when prerequisites are mastered. Students monitor their progress by looking at a pie chart of their standing. It provides clear and understandable feedback, and rechecks learning during its assessments.
Curriculum covers First Grade through Pre-Calculus. There is no finer software available for accelerated, adaptive instruction.
_______________________________________________________________
From November 2004 through December 2005, Dennis Ashendorf used the following software with seven students.
While highly rated in the press, this online program is immature, but will be fixed so it will work better. Currently, it requires a CD be used each time the Internet is accessed, instead of just a login, and students using AOL were unable to access the service using this method. Of concern was the very weak report generation for teachers: no more than a colored-box indicating that a section had been completed by a student. Furthermore, one time a student's data was obliterated. In other words, the database design may be a bit shaky!
The actual structure of the presentation was unusual, but effective. A story problem using non-pretty numbers is given as a "scenario". Answers are entered in a spreadsheet, where a wrong answer is marked red and moving onto the next scenario cannot be attempted until all current answers are correct, some hints are provided, but students can stall. In short, this software can only be used within a classroom environment, but since the numbers are not randomized, cheating would be rampant. Please note that Carnegie claims that the numbers are randomized. However, every time I used a scenario it always had the same numbers. This would be inappropriate in a math lab setting for obvious reasons.
Waiting for a Geometry module from ALEKS would be wise. Still, the Carnegie software is interesting to use. It should be re-examined when a proper reporting module is in place and/or the CD login is eliminated. Also, it has been reviewed as being successful from a research perspective.
_______________________________________________________________
Apex offers a professional appearance, but is only weakly interactive and the problems are always the same. It's designed to sell, not to teach.
