The school district has recently made the transition to a new online personalized learning program which is resulting in mixed reviews from students. Many students have expressed their dislike towards IXL, while many teachers and some students have expressed their appreciation for IXL.
IXL is an online program to help teachers identify grade-level proficiencies and help students improve skills through targeted practice. The hope is that students can address learning gaps or areas where more practice is needed. This is not the first year such a system has been used. IXL was used in middle school last year and a similar program, called Evaluate, was used in high school.
“If I want my students to truly be prepared for assessments like the Algebra 1/Algebra 2 EOC, the ACT, or AccuPlacer then they need to see a variety of problem types over the same concept and IXL does this much better. From a more pedagogical aspect, IXL even offers questions from all four DOK (depth of knowledge) levels, while Evaluate consists of DOK level 1 and 2 questions,” math teacher Amelia Smith said.
The district is using IXL in all grade levels for math and English Language Arts.
IXL offers a wider variety of questions to place a student with a grade and month level in each category, which can be more beneficial to students. IXL helps fill in the education gaps, because, for example, one lesson missed in 6th grade can be the reason they are not understanding a more advanced version of it.
According to teachers Kaya Lynch, Amelia Smith, and Timothy Willis, the majority of students complete their IXL assignments.
Some students like IXL more than Evaluate. IXL work is tied to a students’ grade and does give students opportunities to improve their grade if needed.
“I think it can save people with their grade,” sophomore Alyssa Boyd said.
However, some students are finding that if they are not good at a particular subject, they might have to take hours to get the assignment done because their score goes down so much when they get a question wrong, but it will only go up by 5 points the majority of the time.
However, some students feel as though the testing and skills work distracts from the teacher-led classroom curriculum.
“It takes away from our core learning,” freshman Legacy Struble said.
Some students find that IXL can often be draining since they have multiple assignments and assessments every week and sometimes even every day with very little class time to complete. Freshman Brooke Mazurek and Isabella O’leary agreed that they disliked IXL work.
“It hurts my head,” Mazurek said.
IXL can be very stressful because students are often assigned 5 to 7 assignments every week for one class, often having to get an 80 or above to pass.
Teachers find that IXL is more beneficial to students than it’s predecessor, Evaluate, due to placing students in a certain grade level and month instead of given percentages for the subject as a whole, as well as filling in the missing gaps in education. Sometimes IXL can be more stressful than its predecessor because it can make or break a student’s grade and, instead of once a month, it’s multiple assessments and assignments a week.
