After you complete the assessment, ALEKS will show you your “Pie.” This is the central ALEKS report and navigation tool. It’s a pie chart of all the topics in your ALEKS course, arranged by color-coded subject area. Fat slices have a lot of topics in them, and narrower slices have fewer. The darker shading on each slice tells you how much of that slice YOU have mastered. Your goal in ALEKS Learning Mode is to add topics to this Pie, which will make the dark shading move outward.
The “Summer Prep” assignment will contribute to your course grade.
To demonstrate mastery of a topic, you must select it from the Pie and complete several problems in the topic. The exact number of problems you have to do will depend on your answers. If you get each problem exactly right, you may have to do as few as 2 or 3 problems. On the other hand, if you start getting problems wrong, ALEKS will assign more problems to ensure you have mastery. ALEKS will tell you at each step how many more problems you must get right to get the topic added to your Pie.
If you don’t know how to do a problem, click the “Explain” button at the bottom of the problem. ALEKS will tell you how to do the problem. If you need more help while reading the Explanation, you can use the ALEKSPedia, a built-in FAQ-style explanation of chemistry vocabulary, techniques, and concepts. There’s a direct link to the ALEKSPedia from the ALEKS toolbar, above the Pie. Also, within an Explanation, you’ll usually see lots of hyperlinks on words or phrases about which the ALEKSPedia has more information.
