A+ Interactive Math (Schoolhouse Review)

 

A+ Interactive Math is an online site for homeschool math instruction from K1 through Algebra I. The Full Online Curriculum provides complete math instruction for each grade level through the use of teaching videos, interactive quizzes, and online worksheets.

We were able to review a new addition to the site, the Adaptive Placement Test and Individualized Lesson Plan. This program is intended to assess a student’s math skills and fill in gaps by identifying and specifically remediating weak areas.. This program ($29.99 for 3 months) can be used as a supplement to any math curriculum.

Although Emily is on, or even a little above grade level in her math, she has always needed a lot of review. She’ll seem to be solid on a concept, but if she doesn’t practice it for a few months, she may forget it. I feel like we’re on a spiral with her math education—pressing forward, but cycling back periodically to reteach areas that she may have forgotten. She is studying geometry this year for math, with some algebra review mixed in. I thought that the Adaptive Placement Test and Individualized Lesson Plan would be great for her to work on her algebra skills and bring them up to speed. Unfortunately, we signed into the program to discover that, although the full curriculum covers through Algebra I, the Adaptive Placement test only covers through Pre-Algebra. This was not clear to me from the website. Therefore, I had to sign her up for the Pre-Algebra test and lesson plans.

When you sign into the site, you will have options to take the Adaptive Placement Test, view reports (test results), view the lesson plans, or watch tutorials.

The first thing the student will need to do is to take one or more sections of the Adaptive Placement Test.  These 10-20 question tests cover many areas and the student can choose to do just one test at a time, finish several, or even complete all of the tests in one sitting. Emily did a few a each work session. It turned out that the Pre-Algebra level wasn’t a bad choice for her. Although each of the concept areas should have been quite easy for her, quite a few gaps in her math skills showed up. Although I’m sure many of the weak areas were pure carelessness, rather than lack of competence, she ended up with quite a lot of catch-up work to do (a good lesson in being careful the first time!) This adorable Progress Report demonstrates how close the student is to mastery of each concept. It is viewable from both the student page and the parent page. These are the results of her first assessment. The little men actually walk across the screen toward the goal when you load the page. So cute!

After Emily took a test, lessons were generated for each concept area, depending on what type of questions she missed. She was assigned from 2 to 10 lessons in each concept area that she didn’t pass.

Each lesson included a short multimedia video (Emily said that they explained the concepts well and that they were very helpful), followed by an interactive question and answer set. Then she was able to complete a 10-question online worksheet on the topic. She moved through these quickly, covering 3-4 topics a day.

 

This is one of the video lessons:

The worksheets show just one multiple choice question at time. When the worksheet is completed to the student’s satisfaction, she must click “finalize worksheet.” The results will then appear in the parent reports. Emily didn’t realize this at first, so it appeared that she hadn’t done any work. Fortunately, all work that was not finalized was saved under “pending worksheets” and could be marked as finalized later.  Although she scored 100% on most of her worksheets, if she made mistakes, or if the program glitched in the middle of a worksheet, she was able to attempt the worksheet again until she made a 100%.

After 4 weeks of daily practice with A+ Individualized Lesson Plans, Emily retook the tests and made significant improvement. She still has a few topics that need work, but I was pleased to see that she had many of the weaker areas have been brought up to grade level.

The parent page is very helpful. Not only was I able to see whether Emily had passed or failed each test, I could view her answers to each question to see what she had missed. I was able to see the score and topic for each worksheet she had done and the date on which it was finalized. That helped me keep up with her progress without looking over her shoulder as she worked.

This would be a great program for short term use for struggling students or for any student who may have some gaps. Other Crew members reviewed the Family Math Packages, which is a complete math program. You can find those reviews on the Schoolhouse Review Crew Blog.

A+ Interactive Math is currently running a great special—40-71% off both the Family Math Packages and the Adaptive Placement Test and Individualized Lesson Plan programs.

/

 

/