Ask An ALEKS Implementation Manager: Understanding Pie Progress

Help! I could use an explanation of how to read and understand the Pie Progress Goals in my course. Can you help?

Great question! Tammy here, Implementation Manager from the PNW & NoCal region, and I’d be happy to assist.

The short answer is that a Pie Progress Goal is a snapshot of the student’s progress in the adaptive content of your course. Now let’s get into more details about this type of assignment.

For this question, I’ll assume that you’ve already created the assignment as part of your class. I’ll include some screenshots and brief instructions for those reading that haven’t created a pie progress assignment before.

Add an assignment from the Assignments page.

Name the assignment, set dates, and select your desired course settings.

Pie Progress Goal Assignment settings include a due date, goal percentage, the option to assign to specific students or the entire class, and how the assignment will be graded.

Pie Progress Goal Assignments can be part of the gradebook or purely informational. Your Implementation manager can assist with questions about gradebook and gradebook syncing.

Now that there are assignments, let’s dive into the student experience around Pie Progress Goals. Most importantly, students can't click on a Pie Progress Assignment to begin like traditional assignments. It is better to think of this as a continuous metric that grows as a student learns adaptive content. As students work through your adaptive content, the pie progress score will increase.

The neat thing about Pie Progress is that it gives credit for the highest level of learning that a student completes. While the student might see their total number of mastered topics go up and down (indicating a weak area that they should re-visit after taking a knowledge check), Pie Progress reports the highest water mark for learning.   

Note that Pie Progress Assignments can be especially helpful for instructors who want to give credit for learning that occurred after a due date. Module grades only include learned topics that occur before the due date.

During the term, students can see how they are progressing on this assignment on their student homepage.

To check on student progress, you can access the report from the assignments page. Click the icon to the far right of the Pie Progress assignment.

At the due date, a score will be recorded.  If you’ve paired with your LMS, the scores will populate in the LMS gradebook.

In the sample shown above, the first student earns 77 percent and the second student earns 85 percent. This is the combined total of learned and mastered topics.

If you have any follow-up questions on this topic, your dedicated ALEKS Implementation can help, so don’t hesitate to reach out.