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Curriculum-Based Assessment
Instruction in ALEKS is based on a cycle of recurring assessments of individual student knowledge in relation to the comprehensive set of curriculum goals.
ALEKS requires students to solve open-ended problems using sophisticated input tools. An initial assessment begins after the student learns to use the tools through a brief tutorial. During the initial assessment, ALEKS evaluates the student's current knowledge of the subject by asking a relatively small number of questions. ALEKS chooses each question on the basis of the student's answers to all the previous questions. Each set of assessment questions is unique to each student.
Assessment results are used to guide students to new material according to their preparedness, ensuring that students build on a solid foundation. Instructors and administrators have access at any time to the complete history of a student's assessment results and learning progress in ALEKS.
The ALEKS assessment module provides an efficient guide to learning, in that it differs in principle from any standardized test whose results merely represent the student's achievement as one or more numerical values. An ALEKS assessment determines exactly what a student knows, does not know, and what she is ready to learn next.
Some key features of the assessment module are:
- All problems require that the student produce authentic mathematical input (there are few multiple-choice questions).
- Assessment questions are generated from items ensuring comprehensive coverage of the curriculum.
- The assessment is adaptive; the choice of each new question is based on the collection of responses to all previous questions. As a result, the student's knowledge state can be found by asking only a relatively small subset of the possible questions in the curriculum.
- Assessment results are always framed relative to specified educational standards.
- The entire student system and all of the grade 3-11 content, is available in English and Spanish in assessment and Learning Mode; students can toggle easily between English and Spanish at any time.
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